As docunext readers know, I'm a fan of debian and distcc. I've used distcc to aid with building debian kernels, and now I'm using it with building patched packages.
debian/rules binary CC=distcc CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=40
Not too bad, huh? Works for me.
And now with ccache:
CCACHE_PREFIX='distcc' CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=40 MAKEFLAGS='CC=ccache\ gcc-4.1' make-kpkg --revision=2.6.26-13 --bzimage kernel_image