unix grep to search for multiple filter expressions

Recently, I was searching logs for a multiple string patterns. There are multiple ways to achieve that using "grep -E <string1>  grep -E <string2>". However, the below seemed more efficient

$ grep "08/Aug.*<service name>" access_log | cut -d[ -f2 | cut -d] -f1 | awk -F: '{print $2":00"}' | sort
 -n | uniq -c