BeerBorg

But ain't gonna get one.... Looks like this is only gas powered. I wonder if they'll eventually do electric one. Like it matters to me cuz I'm never gonna be able to afford this.
http://shop.greatfermentations.com/prod ... n=breweasy

whoa, that's nice but man what a price tag.

Nice! I'll order one when the millions get here from my windfall.... yup'rs....... ok

Beer-lord wrote:But ain't gonna get one.... Looks like this is only gas powered. I wonder if they'll eventually do electric one.

"Currently offered only in a gas version but an electric model will be coming soon!"

I'll stick with my cauldron and yeast stick thank you very much.

I see the kettle cart doesn't come with it.

That's a deal-breaker, as far as I'm concerned.

2K? That's a spicy meatball! But, it looks real nice. When I win the lottery, I will buy 3, and sell raffle tickets to the Borg for the spare.

OK I see how you heat your strike water then pump it up into the grain. Then I imagine you drain your first runnings down into the original kettle. But how do you sparge? And how do you boil?

Gymrat wrote:OK I see how you heat your strike water then pump it up into the grain. Then I imagine you drain your first runnings down into the original kettle. But how do you sparge? And how do you boil?

Hi Roger,

Being that it is a RIMS system, the mash liquor is consantly being recirculated through the boil kettle, through the pump and back to the mash tun. The autosparge arm adjusts the rate of recirculation to try to match the size of the orifice that allows the liquor to flow from the mash tun to the boil kettle.

Therefore, the sparge is continuous, and once conversion is complete, the mash tun is simply drained through the grains to the boil pot.

Check out page 10 in the manual...it's kinda buried in the text...

http://blichmannengineering.com/sites/d ... ual_V2.pdf

If I was going to spend that much I'd buy one of these.

http://morebeer.com/products/braumeister-20l.html

The OG limitations do not affect 90% of what I brew, and I could give a crap if I have to add DME to make up some for bigger beers. Most of the bigger beers I'd be adding sugar to anyways, and would not even need to add DME.

I just have to wonder, though....

Is this going a little too far? I mean, is it cheating? Or going right up to the edge of cheating? This is nearly a professional rig, or at least a smaller-scale model of one. Quite a difference between this and mashing in a retro-fitted picnic cooler and boiling on a stove top.

I guess if you can afford it, then you can buy it, right? And it's not really all that different from the guy who can't afford a stir plate and has to shake his yeast starter whenever he walks by. Or the guy who might like a propane burner to get his wort to hot break faster, but it's just not in the cards.

But going to this extreme just sorta seems to go beyond the spirit of "homebrewing", IMO. I know it's a piece of equipment, and in that regard, it's no different from an immersion chiller or a hydrometer. And the same argument can be made by the sour grapes crowd when they see a guy drive by in a Lamborghini while they sit in their Toyota. My car gets me where I wanna go; why should I spend umpty-thousand dollars more?

I guess, to me, it sorta feels like having a ringer in your corner; like having Norm Duke on your company bowling team while everyone else has Bert from Shipping and Sally from Marketing.

What would be the reasons for someone to get this? To impress his friends in his homebrew club? To win competitions? To make his homebrew just that much better?

I tend to think it's more the first two than the third, because plenty of delicious beers have been made without this rig.

I know we always make comments about how hard we work during brewday, but for me, that's part of the joy of this hobby. If I didn't want to work for my beer, I'd buy it at the store. Somehow, this seems almost like cheating. At the very least, it takes away a lot of the hands-on aspect of homebrewing.

I don't know that it is cheating per se. You are still formulating the recipes crushing the grain etc. You would still have to clean spent grain from the mash tun. But it would take some of the fun out of it. I am pretty much happy with the system I currently have.

My brother said the same thing, "that's taking all the fun out of it" and I somewhat agree. Especially those 'coffee maker' type of beer machines that they are starting to sell.
I like bringing some simplicity to home brewing as well as consistency and as much as I like the idea of this system, if I had the money, I'm not really sure I would buy it. I hope the day never comes for me that I dread brewing up a batch of beer. I've looked forward to brew day for years and so far, it's not waning.

If money were no object, I'd consider something like this. I take great pleasure in figuring out what I'd like to brew and finding a recipe that fits that need and making it (and of course consuming it). I would never spend that type of money to brew beer unless money wasn't a restriction, but I would seriously evaluate options like this as I evaluating going to all grain brewing. One of the challenges in this hobby is making something that you can't tell the outcome of for 7 or more weeks. If I moved to all grain, spent all that time, waiting 7 weeks and found my result was awful I'd be really discouraged. If I had equipment like this (I also didn't like the coffee maker device that we all read about recently) that took out the "maintain at x temp for this period and make sure it doesn't go higher or lower or the world will end" I might make that jump more easily.

That said, I can't imagine having $2k plus to do this, there are many other things that the money would get spent on first. But, I can tell you that when I win the lottery (hard, since I don't play it) and have $100+ million, I do plan on opening a personal brewery to make whatever I want with the finest equipment.

I wouldn't call it "cheating". It's doing exactly the same thing as some folks home made recirculating setups, it's just a more compact/sleek/well engineered version. And it costs a lot more because of it.

For me, *if money wasn't an object* a set it and forget it mashing or mashing/boiling device would be useful because I could actually mash more/do AG more often if I could just walk away and ignore it once I combined the ingredients.

As long as I'm still formulating the recipes, I would not think of it as cheating. That's like saying [insert your favorite micro/macro brewery] cheats because they use professional equipment.

Now if you replace the word cheating with a phrase like "less hobby like" then I would agree - it just depends on why you like to do what you do.