No matter how you brew, everybody probably has a part of the process they find boring. For me, it’s milling grain. I’d almost hire somebody to do it for me! Well, not really, but you get the idea. How about you?
Since I mill the grains the night before, the most boring part of my brew-day is waiting for the mash water to heat up. On my kitchen stove, that’s about 40 minutes. Besides making a cup of coffee, there is absolutely nothing for me to do, not even anything to clean.
Whirlpool hops. The boil is complete, I cool just slightly to X°, add hops, recirculate, and ….wait…. …forever… until I can cool to pitch temp. BORING!
Chilling. I hate it. I sit there with an SS immersion chiller and stir until I get the temp down. Depending on the season and temp of ground water, the timeframe can vary but I hate just sitting there stirring!
Not so much boring, but a real PITA is soaking items in acid bath to remove beerstone/oxalate. I use dairy milkstone remover and leave it in solution contact for about a week and it comes off easily, but if rushed, it is a real pain to try to scrub off the scale. I tend to rinse out several vessels with a 2 or 3 gallon diluted batch treated in succession and dump the used solution after the last one, so tying up the solution for a couple weeks or more is typical. I try to catch it very early on, but every once in a while I get a couple three vessels or items on which it has collected. This past weekend I noticed some on a Tilt hydrometer, so it will be next up on the regimen…but first I need to make sure that the housing is able to handle either a soak (a day or so at most) or a wipe down (which may be enough with a pass or two).
chilling the wort absolutely. i dont have a very good wort chiller, though it DOES work, but honestly it takes about 30 minutes and i need to stand there since i actually never was able to make a great seal on the attachment point. i did try, but i should try again harder one day
absolutely, and a very important step, it sounds like you mean stainless steel beerstone, but for me also carboy scrubbing/PBWing etc
same for brewday cleanup, except for the part i mentioned above which is a sort of delayed cleanup
For me, chilling is OK because I can walk away. I sometimes run quick errands during chilling because t takes a while.
The most boring part is watching the wort come to a boil. I have to stand there as it heats for the last ten degrees to make sure it doesn’t boil over. It’s all over if I step away for a second.
Deoxygenating strike water is absolutely the worst for me. No matter if boiling/cooling or using YOS. But it’s even worse because it may or may not even be necessary, I haven’t decided yet. :-\
To be honest most tasks or steps in the brewing process unavoidably take time and are “boring”… brewing with someone usually makes it less tedious.
I hate bottling. As a small batch brewer, I never really had great options, until… now I have three 1-gallon uKeg Go’s that fit on one shelf in my refrigerator. I still bottle often enough, but find it very pleasurable when it’s a day I can keg most or all of it.
I dunno — I find clean up kind of soothing … restoring order out of chaos in at least one small corner of the universe.
I’d go with waiting for the wort to chill … that interminable gap where everything’s done but you still can’t pitch the yeast yet. That’s the most boring part.
Yeah, cleanup is mildly annoying because you just want to be done at that point but it signals the end of the brewday. I try to frame all of it with “this is a hobby that I enjoy” and I also want to brew when I am feeling it … if that makes sense. If I have an open weekend and my first thought is that I’ll brew Friday evening but I’m just not feeling it, I push it off so I’m in a better frame of mind. Talking about beer, seeing a video with a brewer in the brewhouse, etc., I get the urge to brew. Other times not so much so I try to keep it all positive so that all pieces of the process are enjoyable. Except chilling. Chilling is the worst.
Definitely cleanup for me. It usually takes me an hour or so to complete the job, although it is nice to be recirculating caustic through my mash tun RIMS system while the boils is going to clean that part of the brew system.
Cleaning up thee kettle, pump, and the plate chiller after transferring the wort to the kettle takes most of the time at the end since I run caustic through that part of the system for about a half hour before rinsing.