This planner turns a pile of brewing steps into a clock-time schedule for the day. Tell it when you want to start and how long each phase takes, and it lays out exactly when to heat your strike water, mash in, start the boil, chill, and finish cleaning up.
How it works
The math is simple and exact: each step starts when the previous one ends. The planner takes your start time and walks forward, adding each step’s duration to get the next start time. The final step’s end is your finish time, and the sum of all durations is the total brew day length.
The default durations depend on the process type you pick:
- All-grain includes a separate sparge step and longer heating times for a full mash and a full-volume boil.
- BIAB (brew in a bag) mashes and lauters in one vessel, so the sparge step is removed, trimming the day.
- Extract skips the mash and sparge entirely — you steep specialty grains briefly, then go straight to the boil, making it the shortest day.
You can override every duration to match your own kettle, burner, and chiller.
Worked example
Start at 09:00, all-grain, with defaults: 30 min strike heat, 60 min mash, 15 min mash-out, 20 min sparge, 25 min heat to boil, 60 min boil, 20 min chill, 15 min transfer and pitch, 45 min cleanup. That totals 290 minutes ≈ 4 h 50 m, so mash-in is at 09:30, the boil starts at 11:30, and you finish around 13:50.
Tips
- Heating and chilling are the steps brewers most often underestimate — measure yours once and reuse the real numbers.
- Build in a buffer before the boil; a watched pot that boils over costs more than ten planned minutes.
- Cleanup is part of the day. Scheduling it stops it from sprawling into the evening. All calculations run locally in your browser.