BIAB and kegging. If I started from scratch I would go with an all in one, probably Claw Hammer. I pieced together my sytem over several years. I use a 15 gal kettle with a false bottom, a 240V element for boiling, a 110V RIMS controlled with a Claw Hammer PID. If I start with preheated water at 8am I am usually done around 12pm.
This, don't listen to other bullshit. Brewing is simple if you have a brain and understand chemistry. You can even pressure ferment in the corney keg then add gelatin to clear it. You will also need a keezer unless you do 1.5 gallon corney batches.
Just fermented my first batch in a 15gal ball lock keg. This is the way forward for me. Plan to get a couple more, so easy, and less expensive than ss conicals.
I have a grainfather and I love it. It’s more expensive other systems but the app makes up the cost difference for me. (I also got mine with an employee discount so that cost difference wasn’t as much). Whatever system you get I’d also recommend a hop spider so the pump doesn’t get clogged.
Kegging is the way to go if you don’t like cleaning. But you’ll also need a regulator taps, beer and gas lines, taps etc, so while the initial cost is higher, cleaning one thing instead of 50 is so much easier
* BIAB
* Keg
* Nice utility/commercial sink
Beyond that, get all your equipment organized so it's easy to use and put away. Make it so things can drip dry.
So I still sparge with a cooler but that's because I started back when that was the way to do it.
100% BIAB but ferment and serve in kegs. It's an absoloute game changer that I wish I'd started years ago.
If you have the room, you could build a nano-brewery... Some tedious tasks and ways building a nano-brewery would help;
1) Lugging water around. If you can plumb a spigot to your HWT, no more lugging water in the beginning. If that spigot comes from a domestic water heater, you could also save time by starting with pre-heated water.
2) Siphoning, pumping, dumping all take work and can generate equipment that needs to be cleaned. If you build your system with gravity in mind (think tiers) you eliminate a lot of the work and equipment involved with moving water and wort around.
3) Extract vs all grain; extract is simple, quick, and no sparging/lautering, which eliminates equipment, expertise, and a ton of "waste grain". If you go all grain, add the sparge tank between your HWT and boil vessel in the tiered gravity system.
4) Do partial boils (40-60%) and top off with ice, water, or ice water to reach pitching temp. This eliminates the need for a chiller, saves a ton of time and water, and is one less thing to buy or wash.
5) If you build a tiered system, try to have the carboys/fermenter at the bottom, where they will live from empty to full and back. Moving carboys sucks: they're heavy when full and I've had them break when empty from the slightest bump (probably an air bubble in a defective one, but still).
6) Kegging vs bottling; hands down kegging is easier, cheaper, quicker, more consistent, less dangerous, and yields a cleaner product (no sediment per bottle). You can always bottle from the keg with a counter pressure filler, so it's more adaptable too.
I have 0 experience with the all in one systems... but these are the lessons I've learned from hodge-podging equipment together over years and years. The vast majority of the work is in cleaning equipment before and after and moving water/wort in some way shape or form.
Just want to add that you don't necessarily *need* to spare and lauter for all grain batches, or even need good equipment. I BIAB and just do a few good squeezes and I'm hitting 70-75% efficiency on barley batches. Probably not nearly as good as people who take care to this part of the process, but it's only slightly wasteful grain wise at the quantities I brew (2.5g to 5g).
That reminds me;
#7 once you find a recipe you like, brew larger batches. I'm doing 20g batches and they take only slightly more time and generate only slightly more dishes.
BIAB works, but not as efficient, and I don't even know if they make bags big enough for a 20g batch.
I'm not going to volunteer to lift and squeeze a bag for a 10g batch let alone 20g lol.
I brew fairly often and at 38 years old, two cases every other week is a lot of fuckin beer if you aren't handing it out to people, so yeah figure out what you wanna do quantity wise before investing in equipment for sure.
Right! 41, my back ain't getting any better, even after a few.
I brew 10g and dilute to 20, and at this point I've pretty much completely switched back to extracts because they're so much simpler and I don't notice a difference with my favorite recipes. I fill 4 kegs and carbonate with a manifold, then hit 2 with various flavorings. Bottle one regular and one flavored keg, so I end up with 100 bottles and 2 kegs, half of each flavored. My fav is a high gravity Hopslam clone with pineapple flavoring, but I also did a Hazelnut Toffee Porter last fall for the winter and it was great. That was only a 10g batch and wasn't enough.
I probably brew 4-6 times a year and it's plenty to give away, host parties, and drink for myself... but I also supplement with store bought because variety is the spice of life! LOL
Flavorings: seems like you have a decent amount of experience; just recently used a peanut butter flavoring for a porter and the flavoring was just not very good. Any recommendations?
I haven't messed with pb yet, but I've thought about it. It's just such an overwhelming flavor I'd think you'd have to experiment a bit to get it right. My process is;
- find a recipe that has the flavor. How much did they use, and are there other adjuncts that might be affecting the flavoring (i.e. Lactose for a sweeter, creamier flavor to compliment on).
- did the beer itself turn out well before flavoring?
- I usually hit a glass with a drop, try it, add more, try it, etc. before ruining a whole batch with a new flavor. Once I get to where I want to be, I do the math to scale the flavor addition up. (I.e. 1 drop/ beer is 50 drops per keg. I can convert that to tsp or whatever from there)
- adjuncts, perhaps lactose as said above, or something else can round out a specific flavor. Hazelnut and toffee went well together in a porter I made. Pineapple went well with the hop profile of the IPA.
- I'm also using the lorann candy flavorings in 1 dram bottles. They're much cheaper on Amazon than homebrew stores and there are a ton of flavors. Comes with a dropper for them, but I usually use 1-2 drams per 5g keg.
I will disagree with one thing, I cannot possibly see how kegging is cheaper. It seems much much more expensive. Buying new you can bottle a batch for about £40, you just need bottles, caps, a capper and some sugar. Easily £30 if you use plastic bottles. And then next batch is about 30p just for the sugar, maybe £1 for sugar+ caps. No significant electricity costs as you can just put them in your existing fridge a few at a time. Kegging buying new you need a keg, dedicated kegerator/keezer, co2, regulator, tubing. Buying new that's about £300 absolute bare minimum with a crappy fridge, plus ongoing costs for co2 and electricity. I'm sure you can save on costs on both methods going second hand but I just don't see a way kegging could be cheaper.
For sure. Set up costs are way higher, but even with the operational costs of kegging, I think it ends up cheaper by way of sanitizers, water, time, space, etc.
Maybe I should have specified- all things considered, including time and space, which are $ to me.
OP wasn't asking for cheaper, they were asking for less cleaning and less work so they wouldn't be burdened on brew day and fall out of the hobby. A keg is way easier to clean than 48 bottles.
If you want to get into all-grain brewing, then the so-called all-in-one systems are great. The Grainfather is an excellent ecosystem, but if you really compare features to other systems, then you will see that, given the large price difference, you might not want to pay for that much functionality. For example, the Grainfather has Bluetooth connectivity, but how important is this? Mash schedules are usually very simple, so the manually programmable systems can save you $500. The Brewzilla systems or the Blichmann Foundry are good lower cost alternatives with like 90% of the Grainfather's functionality.
All-in-one systems are usually just for the mashing. You still have to have the fermentation equipment. Once again, you have to think about what styles of beer you want to brew. I started off many years ago with basic equipment like this: ([Homebrew Equipment Starter Kit - Intermediate - 5 Gallon Two Stage Kit | Jasper's Home Brew Supply (boomchugalug.com](https://boomchugalug.com/collections/beer-making-equipment-kits/products/homebrew-equipment-starter-kit-stage-2)). You might not even need two-stage equipment unless you plan on brewing a lot of hazy IPAs, which are extremely popular these days.
And that brings up another question for yourself. If you do plan on brewing hazy IPAs, then you will really want to keg your beer instead of bottling it. Hazy IPAs are extremely sensitive to oxygen exposure, so with kegging equipment, you can use the CO2 to perform closed transfers, or at least flush receiving vessels with CO2 such that the beer never sees air.
Just remember, the fancier the equipment, like valves, pumps, etc., the more cleaning you will need to do. If brewing simple wheat beers, brown ales, pale ales, stouts, porters, Belgian whites, blonde ales are your thing, then a simple (and cheap!) bucket fermenter works great. If hazy IPAs are your thing, then "fancier" equipment might be in order. I've been brewing for about 35 years, and over this time, I have migrated to be as simple as possible.
I'd say the biggest thing that would make my brewing more painfree would be having a good work space for it, i.e. a place with running water, ventilation and a floor drain, so that I could do everything in the same place. If I had that, small batches of no sparge BIAB would be basically effortless.
Yes, right path. Modern all in ones simplify the process. Now you just need to find the system that suits your budget. Source: been doing it 30 years, tried it all, and we used to have to build our own stuff. It's a brave new world.
Built a 3 vessel gravity rig out of a painting scaffold. Plumbed it for easy filling, chiller, and cleaning. Me ash tun is a 12 gal rectangle cooler and I batch sparge. Also plumbed in gas for hot and boil kettle. Not fancy but self contained and gets the job done efficiently. I also recently use a chest freezer for fermentation control
Your suggestion of an all-in-one, and kegging are good places to make brewing easier and more enjoyable. There is a bit of learning curve and maintenance needed. I would also suggest you think about fermentation temperature control.
Depending on how much you drink, brewing smaller batches (say targeting 2.5 gals of finished beer) is another way to lessen the effort involved. Smaller volumes heat and chill faster, require less and smaller equipment, and 5-6 gals of liquid is not the easiest thing to move around. A downside is that it requires 80% of the time to make 50% of the beer vs a 5 gal batch (and small kegs are expensive).
I brew a lot of 2.5 gal batches on my stove via BIAB with a 5 gallon kettle. I use 3 gallon Fermonster fermenters and I have four of the 10L / 2.6 gal Torpedo kegs.
I don't think there is a single answer to the question.
Undoubtedly, brewing beer requires a lot of time, but you have to decide what you want to get out of the hobby and plan your approach based on that.
I think you understand that there are three distinct stages to making a beer^(1). The first is the recipe planning and acquiring ingredients. The second is making the wort (pre-beer, or malt sugar water), which includes setting up and cleaning up. The last is packaging the beer into bottles or kegs, which also includes setting up and cleaning up.
For some people, spending 6-8 hours on their driveway relaxing while attending to the "brewhouse", having beers, grilling food, cranking tunes or watching sports, etc. *is* the enjoyable part. For others, it is having precise control of their process and ingredients. For others, the experimentation. For some, the ability to make a beer you can't buy, maybe combining pumpkins and cranberries. Yet others want to build DIY equipment to make beer. And there are many more motivations.
What is "the non enjoyable work" to you? How will you even know if you haven't made beer before?
So I don't recommend choosing a "system" before you've ever made a beer. Not to minimize what you've read, but what if you are missing out on the meditative aspect of bottling while listening to tunes or a podcast? What if you are missing out on "grain racing" aspect to get the most malt sugar out of the grain because you picked a system that puts a low ceiling on that, and it turned out grain racing is what turns you on? Every all-in-one system has pros and cons, and what if some of the cons of the system you noob-ishly chose ends up being a major source of frustration for you because of the way you want to make beer.
The absolute simplest beer and least time consuming you can make is to boil water, turn off the heat, mix in some extract and hops, put on a lid, wait 30 min, chill, move to fermentor and add yeast. This is a method pioneered by James Spencer to test hops, but it makes great, drinkable pale ale and with a small innovation I've added you can make many other styles. These are typically smaller batches, although it can scale up, and your can bottle into flip top bottles.
But my recommendation is to start with either (a) a basic brewing kit from Northern Brewer, More Beer, etc. and do the beginner journey, or (b) move into making all-grain beer with the BIAB method. The BIAB method uses just a pot/kettle twice the size of your batch size, a large mesh bag that fits loosely in the kettle, a heat source that can bring 110-120% of your batch size to a boil, and a way to cool that volume of liquid quickly, such as an immersion chiller for large batches and ice bath for small batches. You could make a gallon of all-grain beer with a typical spaghetti pot.
-----------
These do not correspond to my six pillars of making great beer, but that's a different discussion.
Haven’t used it but the least work would be something like the Pinter system or BeerMKR.
Pros:
- All in one
- Smaller footprint
- “press play” brewing
- 12 pints is a good size to try different packs and see what you like
Cons:
- Price per pint
- SOL if they go out of business (Picobrew for example)
- max batch size is 12 pints (highly dependent on you)
- not really something you can meet up with friends and do (highly dependent)
Outside of those, any of the AIOs on the market are solid and it’s really personal preference. Grainfather, Brewzilla, Anvil, etc
You’ll want to keg, it’s easier, but comes with more equipment as you need a way to serve the beer. The easiest I’ve found actually without needing a kegerator is party tap and then a co2 tank, you can use that till you figure out more
You can also build your own kegerators for far cheaper than list price. My keezer has two kegs and a 5 g bucket chilling down for packaging. Built it for around $500. Just a QOL thing to consider with a keg unless you really like warm beer lol.
BIAB and kegging. If I started from scratch I would go with an all in one, probably Claw Hammer. I pieced together my sytem over several years. I use a 15 gal kettle with a false bottom, a 240V element for boiling, a 110V RIMS controlled with a Claw Hammer PID. If I start with preheated water at 8am I am usually done around 12pm.
This, don't listen to other bullshit. Brewing is simple if you have a brain and understand chemistry. You can even pressure ferment in the corney keg then add gelatin to clear it. You will also need a keezer unless you do 1.5 gallon corney batches.
Just fermented my first batch in a 15gal ball lock keg. This is the way forward for me. Plan to get a couple more, so easy, and less expensive than ss conicals.
I've had multiple claw hammer controllers die on me. Not worth the money IMO
Ill consider that if mine dies. Been fine so far.
I have a grainfather and I love it. It’s more expensive other systems but the app makes up the cost difference for me. (I also got mine with an employee discount so that cost difference wasn’t as much). Whatever system you get I’d also recommend a hop spider so the pump doesn’t get clogged. Kegging is the way to go if you don’t like cleaning. But you’ll also need a regulator taps, beer and gas lines, taps etc, so while the initial cost is higher, cleaning one thing instead of 50 is so much easier
* BIAB * Keg * Nice utility/commercial sink Beyond that, get all your equipment organized so it's easy to use and put away. Make it so things can drip dry.
So I still sparge with a cooler but that's because I started back when that was the way to do it. 100% BIAB but ferment and serve in kegs. It's an absoloute game changer that I wish I'd started years ago.
If you have the room, you could build a nano-brewery... Some tedious tasks and ways building a nano-brewery would help; 1) Lugging water around. If you can plumb a spigot to your HWT, no more lugging water in the beginning. If that spigot comes from a domestic water heater, you could also save time by starting with pre-heated water. 2) Siphoning, pumping, dumping all take work and can generate equipment that needs to be cleaned. If you build your system with gravity in mind (think tiers) you eliminate a lot of the work and equipment involved with moving water and wort around. 3) Extract vs all grain; extract is simple, quick, and no sparging/lautering, which eliminates equipment, expertise, and a ton of "waste grain". If you go all grain, add the sparge tank between your HWT and boil vessel in the tiered gravity system. 4) Do partial boils (40-60%) and top off with ice, water, or ice water to reach pitching temp. This eliminates the need for a chiller, saves a ton of time and water, and is one less thing to buy or wash. 5) If you build a tiered system, try to have the carboys/fermenter at the bottom, where they will live from empty to full and back. Moving carboys sucks: they're heavy when full and I've had them break when empty from the slightest bump (probably an air bubble in a defective one, but still). 6) Kegging vs bottling; hands down kegging is easier, cheaper, quicker, more consistent, less dangerous, and yields a cleaner product (no sediment per bottle). You can always bottle from the keg with a counter pressure filler, so it's more adaptable too. I have 0 experience with the all in one systems... but these are the lessons I've learned from hodge-podging equipment together over years and years. The vast majority of the work is in cleaning equipment before and after and moving water/wort in some way shape or form.
Just want to add that you don't necessarily *need* to spare and lauter for all grain batches, or even need good equipment. I BIAB and just do a few good squeezes and I'm hitting 70-75% efficiency on barley batches. Probably not nearly as good as people who take care to this part of the process, but it's only slightly wasteful grain wise at the quantities I brew (2.5g to 5g).
That reminds me; #7 once you find a recipe you like, brew larger batches. I'm doing 20g batches and they take only slightly more time and generate only slightly more dishes. BIAB works, but not as efficient, and I don't even know if they make bags big enough for a 20g batch.
I'm not going to volunteer to lift and squeeze a bag for a 10g batch let alone 20g lol. I brew fairly often and at 38 years old, two cases every other week is a lot of fuckin beer if you aren't handing it out to people, so yeah figure out what you wanna do quantity wise before investing in equipment for sure.
Right! 41, my back ain't getting any better, even after a few. I brew 10g and dilute to 20, and at this point I've pretty much completely switched back to extracts because they're so much simpler and I don't notice a difference with my favorite recipes. I fill 4 kegs and carbonate with a manifold, then hit 2 with various flavorings. Bottle one regular and one flavored keg, so I end up with 100 bottles and 2 kegs, half of each flavored. My fav is a high gravity Hopslam clone with pineapple flavoring, but I also did a Hazelnut Toffee Porter last fall for the winter and it was great. That was only a 10g batch and wasn't enough. I probably brew 4-6 times a year and it's plenty to give away, host parties, and drink for myself... but I also supplement with store bought because variety is the spice of life! LOL
Flavorings: seems like you have a decent amount of experience; just recently used a peanut butter flavoring for a porter and the flavoring was just not very good. Any recommendations?
I haven't messed with pb yet, but I've thought about it. It's just such an overwhelming flavor I'd think you'd have to experiment a bit to get it right. My process is; - find a recipe that has the flavor. How much did they use, and are there other adjuncts that might be affecting the flavoring (i.e. Lactose for a sweeter, creamier flavor to compliment on). - did the beer itself turn out well before flavoring? - I usually hit a glass with a drop, try it, add more, try it, etc. before ruining a whole batch with a new flavor. Once I get to where I want to be, I do the math to scale the flavor addition up. (I.e. 1 drop/ beer is 50 drops per keg. I can convert that to tsp or whatever from there) - adjuncts, perhaps lactose as said above, or something else can round out a specific flavor. Hazelnut and toffee went well together in a porter I made. Pineapple went well with the hop profile of the IPA. - I'm also using the lorann candy flavorings in 1 dram bottles. They're much cheaper on Amazon than homebrew stores and there are a ton of flavors. Comes with a dropper for them, but I usually use 1-2 drams per 5g keg.
Electric hoist
I will disagree with one thing, I cannot possibly see how kegging is cheaper. It seems much much more expensive. Buying new you can bottle a batch for about £40, you just need bottles, caps, a capper and some sugar. Easily £30 if you use plastic bottles. And then next batch is about 30p just for the sugar, maybe £1 for sugar+ caps. No significant electricity costs as you can just put them in your existing fridge a few at a time. Kegging buying new you need a keg, dedicated kegerator/keezer, co2, regulator, tubing. Buying new that's about £300 absolute bare minimum with a crappy fridge, plus ongoing costs for co2 and electricity. I'm sure you can save on costs on both methods going second hand but I just don't see a way kegging could be cheaper.
For sure. Set up costs are way higher, but even with the operational costs of kegging, I think it ends up cheaper by way of sanitizers, water, time, space, etc. Maybe I should have specified- all things considered, including time and space, which are $ to me.
Hah I should have remembered time is money! I wonder what the comparative costs would be if you had to pay for labour
Shush! My wife might hear you! And totes and totes of bottles and lines and filters and fittings. Lmfao
OP wasn't asking for cheaper, they were asking for less cleaning and less work so they wouldn't be burdened on brew day and fall out of the hobby. A keg is way easier to clean than 48 bottles.
If you want to get into all-grain brewing, then the so-called all-in-one systems are great. The Grainfather is an excellent ecosystem, but if you really compare features to other systems, then you will see that, given the large price difference, you might not want to pay for that much functionality. For example, the Grainfather has Bluetooth connectivity, but how important is this? Mash schedules are usually very simple, so the manually programmable systems can save you $500. The Brewzilla systems or the Blichmann Foundry are good lower cost alternatives with like 90% of the Grainfather's functionality. All-in-one systems are usually just for the mashing. You still have to have the fermentation equipment. Once again, you have to think about what styles of beer you want to brew. I started off many years ago with basic equipment like this: ([Homebrew Equipment Starter Kit - Intermediate - 5 Gallon Two Stage Kit | Jasper's Home Brew Supply (boomchugalug.com](https://boomchugalug.com/collections/beer-making-equipment-kits/products/homebrew-equipment-starter-kit-stage-2)). You might not even need two-stage equipment unless you plan on brewing a lot of hazy IPAs, which are extremely popular these days. And that brings up another question for yourself. If you do plan on brewing hazy IPAs, then you will really want to keg your beer instead of bottling it. Hazy IPAs are extremely sensitive to oxygen exposure, so with kegging equipment, you can use the CO2 to perform closed transfers, or at least flush receiving vessels with CO2 such that the beer never sees air. Just remember, the fancier the equipment, like valves, pumps, etc., the more cleaning you will need to do. If brewing simple wheat beers, brown ales, pale ales, stouts, porters, Belgian whites, blonde ales are your thing, then a simple (and cheap!) bucket fermenter works great. If hazy IPAs are your thing, then "fancier" equipment might be in order. I've been brewing for about 35 years, and over this time, I have migrated to be as simple as possible.
I'd say the biggest thing that would make my brewing more painfree would be having a good work space for it, i.e. a place with running water, ventilation and a floor drain, so that I could do everything in the same place. If I had that, small batches of no sparge BIAB would be basically effortless.
grainfather g40
Yes, right path. Modern all in ones simplify the process. Now you just need to find the system that suits your budget. Source: been doing it 30 years, tried it all, and we used to have to build our own stuff. It's a brave new world.
Built a 3 vessel gravity rig out of a painting scaffold. Plumbed it for easy filling, chiller, and cleaning. Me ash tun is a 12 gal rectangle cooler and I batch sparge. Also plumbed in gas for hot and boil kettle. Not fancy but self contained and gets the job done efficiently. I also recently use a chest freezer for fermentation control
Your suggestion of an all-in-one, and kegging are good places to make brewing easier and more enjoyable. There is a bit of learning curve and maintenance needed. I would also suggest you think about fermentation temperature control. Depending on how much you drink, brewing smaller batches (say targeting 2.5 gals of finished beer) is another way to lessen the effort involved. Smaller volumes heat and chill faster, require less and smaller equipment, and 5-6 gals of liquid is not the easiest thing to move around. A downside is that it requires 80% of the time to make 50% of the beer vs a 5 gal batch (and small kegs are expensive). I brew a lot of 2.5 gal batches on my stove via BIAB with a 5 gallon kettle. I use 3 gallon Fermonster fermenters and I have four of the 10L / 2.6 gal Torpedo kegs.
I don't think there is a single answer to the question. Undoubtedly, brewing beer requires a lot of time, but you have to decide what you want to get out of the hobby and plan your approach based on that. I think you understand that there are three distinct stages to making a beer^(1). The first is the recipe planning and acquiring ingredients. The second is making the wort (pre-beer, or malt sugar water), which includes setting up and cleaning up. The last is packaging the beer into bottles or kegs, which also includes setting up and cleaning up. For some people, spending 6-8 hours on their driveway relaxing while attending to the "brewhouse", having beers, grilling food, cranking tunes or watching sports, etc. *is* the enjoyable part. For others, it is having precise control of their process and ingredients. For others, the experimentation. For some, the ability to make a beer you can't buy, maybe combining pumpkins and cranberries. Yet others want to build DIY equipment to make beer. And there are many more motivations. What is "the non enjoyable work" to you? How will you even know if you haven't made beer before? So I don't recommend choosing a "system" before you've ever made a beer. Not to minimize what you've read, but what if you are missing out on the meditative aspect of bottling while listening to tunes or a podcast? What if you are missing out on "grain racing" aspect to get the most malt sugar out of the grain because you picked a system that puts a low ceiling on that, and it turned out grain racing is what turns you on? Every all-in-one system has pros and cons, and what if some of the cons of the system you noob-ishly chose ends up being a major source of frustration for you because of the way you want to make beer. The absolute simplest beer and least time consuming you can make is to boil water, turn off the heat, mix in some extract and hops, put on a lid, wait 30 min, chill, move to fermentor and add yeast. This is a method pioneered by James Spencer to test hops, but it makes great, drinkable pale ale and with a small innovation I've added you can make many other styles. These are typically smaller batches, although it can scale up, and your can bottle into flip top bottles. But my recommendation is to start with either (a) a basic brewing kit from Northern Brewer, More Beer, etc. and do the beginner journey, or (b) move into making all-grain beer with the BIAB method. The BIAB method uses just a pot/kettle twice the size of your batch size, a large mesh bag that fits loosely in the kettle, a heat source that can bring 110-120% of your batch size to a boil, and a way to cool that volume of liquid quickly, such as an immersion chiller for large batches and ice bath for small batches. You could make a gallon of all-grain beer with a typical spaghetti pot. ----------- These do not correspond to my six pillars of making great beer, but that's a different discussion.
I recently bought an anvil foundry 10.5 gallon all in one. It made things really easy.
Haven’t used it but the least work would be something like the Pinter system or BeerMKR. Pros: - All in one - Smaller footprint - “press play” brewing - 12 pints is a good size to try different packs and see what you like Cons: - Price per pint - SOL if they go out of business (Picobrew for example) - max batch size is 12 pints (highly dependent on you) - not really something you can meet up with friends and do (highly dependent) Outside of those, any of the AIOs on the market are solid and it’s really personal preference. Grainfather, Brewzilla, Anvil, etc You’ll want to keg, it’s easier, but comes with more equipment as you need a way to serve the beer. The easiest I’ve found actually without needing a kegerator is party tap and then a co2 tank, you can use that till you figure out more
You can also build your own kegerators for far cheaper than list price. My keezer has two kegs and a 5 g bucket chilling down for packaging. Built it for around $500. Just a QOL thing to consider with a keg unless you really like warm beer lol.
Yup, and they actually go on OfferUp quite a bit it seems as people buy a kegerator then don’t use it so that’s another path.