I just started home brewing and I'm not sure I understand this product. "Hit brew and walk away" says USA Today. Why, that's almost as easy as simply buying beer! This kind of defeats the point of home brewing as a hobby :) It's not like there's a shortage of excellent commercial beer and we need a special machine to fill a gap in the market.
I think perhaps you're viewing this from the wrong direction. This device isn't aimed at people who love the home-brew process. They aren't going to buy a device which reduces their enjoyment. Likewise there's many people who love baking, and wouldn't dream of using a bread maker. The device is aimed at people who maybe enjoy the idea of brewing beer, but not the practical (and complicated) steps required. Something like this device isn't so much aimed at the existing homebrew market, but designed to create a new market.
I think the bread maker analogy is a really good one. I'd consider buying a bread maker precisely because I don't particularly enjoy the drawn out process of baking bread, but I do enjoy both having freshly baked bread and being able to make bread with the stuff I like in it.
If I had to do it again, though, I'd get a smaller one. Something that can make a 1-pound loaf. My family doesn't go through 1.5 pounds in a day, and when you have a bread maker, keeping day-old bread is not an option.
Are you doing full grain or malt extract? I bet this thing requires cleaning on the order of brewing from extract.
Also if you're doing full grain and want to reduce headache and clean up and equipment costs, check out brew in a bag. (Not the cheesy thing they sell at Wal-Mart around Christmas.) I haven't done it yet but from the reviews I've read and videos I've watched it seems like a greatly simplified method.
Brew in a bag (BIAB) is a great way to start testing the all grain method with very little money investment. Grab a paint strainer bag from home depot pack of two for $5 and away you go.
I have always done full grain. The bags don't get good conversion yields in my opinion cause the grain really only gets good exposure around the outside.
I have seen/had a few of my friends' extract brews and I agree they are much simpler, in some cases the beers were about on par too.
BIAB does have lower efficiency, but having less stuff around the apartment makes it worthwhile. Using some extra grain is a bummer, but not a terrible tradeoff.
I think the idea is that you can customize the recipe. Based on the video, it looks like you can set everything about the mash temps, grain bill, hop schedule- everything you can do on a normal homebrewing setup, but with less time spent futzing with a burner trying to get your mash temp exactly right.
Not at all. It allows you to concentrate more on the recipe and less on the technique.
I've homebrewed for years and my biggest complaint has always been it's damn near impossible for me to make the same beer twice. There are so many variables in the brewing process itself that are hard to control (probably the biggest being temperature). Even with a very tight process it's likely that you're going to get some variance that will affect fermentation.
Use a microcontroller to manage the heating element and couple that with a PID to hit your target temperature. I can give you some tips on how to do it, although tuning PIDs can be somewhat time consuming...
"It was very clear to me that while there were a bunch of hardware hobbyists that could assemble their own computers, or at least take our board and add the transformers for the power supply and the case the keyboard and go get, you know, et cetera, go get the rest of the stuff. For every one of those there were a thousand people that couldn't do that, but wanted to mess around with programming - software hobbyists." -- Steve Jobs on the Apple II
I strongly disagree. I've been homebrewing all-grain batches for about six years. My typical brewday takes about nine hours and involves four distinct vessels. There's a lot of heavy lifting and a lot of cleaning.
This machine would make better beer, more consistently, and with a lot less effort.
I guess it's like a first generation breadmaker. Home brewed beer can be awful, but when it comes out right, it's worlds apart from anything you can buy in a grocery store.
Your grocery store must have a terrible selection of beer. I home brew because I enjoy it. I'm under no delusions that my beers will ever be significantly better than the best I can buy in a store.
The idea that the hobbyist will in general produce a far better product than an industry of passionate experts is kind of ridiculous.
Hey, now; either my grocery store sucks, or I am/was a dang good home brewer.
Seriously; when it came out well (2/3 batches), the only thing that could compete with it was straight from the microbrewery tap. Never could make a decent lager, but for any kind of ale, it was great. I blame freshness, which is an under appreciated beer quality. Also, lack of the now popular practice of overhopping; almost everything in the store these days seems to be an IPA or overhopped porter.
Maybe the beer at your grocery store just isn't very fresh? The better grocery stores around me have a great selection of beer that seems about as fresh as what I make at home. Maybe the distribution chain is better here (Seattle). I've never noticed freshness as an issue at least.
As for making exactly what you want, that's totally valid. If your palette doesn't quite match what the breweries are producing (e.g. you want less hops) then yes, you can produce a better beer for you at home.
Berkeley isn't exactly the Sahara.
Now I'm wondering if it wasn't my pride fooling me, but I am pretty dang sure you can taste the difference between belhaven (which I think languishes on a cargo ship before it gets to my local bevmo) and a home brewed clone which tastes like a fresher/better version of the same thing.
My favorite quasi-invention: beer with a small serrano pepper added to each bottle. It didn't age well (it eventually turned into beery hot sauce), but it was delicious for the first few weeks.
For some people a lot of the appeal is saving money (beer can be ridiculously expensive where I live; just a bottle is often more than €3), and beer often tastes its best when fresh. Also, not everyone has access to excellent craft beers.
I doubt it too, but if you can save $1 a bottle I know a lot of people who'd recoup it in a year or two.
My experience with homebrewing though is that it's not cheaper unless you drink much, much more than I do and don't value your time highly. This at least takes half of that out of the equation.
But again - there's the variety. I moved to Ireland a couple years ago and discovered to my horror that while the microbrew scene here is good, there were no pumpkin beers and no double IPA's to be found. I dearly missed Arrogant Bastard as well.
A boiler, a couple buckets, and a few crappy batches later, I finally had a decent AB-inspired recipe. (Kind of terrifying that the initials for Arrogant Bastard match Anheuser Busch). In many regards I prefer it; at 6.2% it's a little mellower and better as an after work beer, and I don't bottle it in bombers so opening one isn't such a commitment. Everyone's biased, but when I have friends over the stuff goes quickly so I figure that's reasonably indicative of quality.
The time part of the equation is fuzzy. I happen to enjoy the act of homebrewing, so I slot it under "pleasant Sunday afternoon activities", which makes me not perceive the opportunity cost so much. I have friends who are unemployed and getting in to the hobby, and again, this is a country where a 6 pack of any halfway decent beer can easily be €15-€20, so brewing 25 litres of beer for about 5 hours of time and maybe €20 in grain, hops, yeast, and electricity is a pretty appealing notion.
As someone who used to homebrew but had to quit when I had kids (due to time) this looks like something I could totally get into. I would miss the process, but the idea of getting a good beer without the time sink is very intriguing!
I was in the same boat and a friend recommended that I scale down the operation to a single gallon at a time. The equipment is a little less unwieldy, so sanitizing time is reduced. The water gets to the right temperature much faster. Less grain == less sparging time. The boil volume is a bit over a gallon, which is easily contained in a modest sized pot, so boil-overs are almost a non-concern. I let the grains steep and then start the bath routine and read books. After that, sparge and start the boil. I can get an all grain batch made on a Tuesday evening.
Plus, the smaller batch sizes let you experiment and you won't be saddled with the 5 gallons of terrible oktoberfest in my basement.
I just made this switch myself. My new tiny SF apartment makes 5-gallon batches impractical, so I brewed my first 1-gallon batch yesterday. I'll see how the results are in a month, but right now I can say that the process is way easier:
- Equipment mostly fits in my dishwasher
- Moving/pouring 1 gallon of liquid is faster, easier, and results in less spillage than 5 gallons
- No need for a wort chiller, since an ice bath is more than effective enough for a 1-gallon batch
- Fermentation control will be a lot cheaper, since a small dorm fridge will fit the fermenter
- As you pointed out: more experimentation because the cost of failure is much lower
EDIT: Just for clarification, just before my first daughter was born I was doing 15 gallon boils with a converted cooler for a mash tun. It was so much fun! But the time to do all that and cleanup (as you know, cleaning is THE most important part of course and a significant slice of the time) was pretty much a whole Saturday morning and afternoon, prime kid time.
You steep the grains in your brew pot for an hour and then sparge by using an additional pot and a large colander. Brooklyn Brew Shop sells one gallon brew kits, but if you already have brewing supplies, the only thing you would need to add is a one gallon carboy (I buy the gallon jugs of wine at the supermarket, and then just re-use the jugs).
I brew both 5 gallon batches and 1 gallon batches (mostly for experimentation). TO keep the costs down on the gallon batches, I use washed yeast and hops leftover from other recipes. The cool thing about the gallon batches is you can squeeze in an all-grain brew in an evening on a weekday, but the obvious downside is it only yields ~9 beers, which I find to be too small a yield for the amount of effort. Also, if you already have a wort chiller, you won't save that much time compared to a 5 gallon extract brew.
If you are dead set on all grain, others on this thread have mentioned the brew-in-the-bag method. It looks like you just steep the grains (using a really big mesh bag). It looks like this method gets you about 3 gallons, but if you already have a bunch of equipment, you could probably adapt this method to 5 gallons.
I've steeped grains before, but that's pretty significantly different from a real mash. Usually steeping grains was used to enhance a base extract which formed the base of the boil. So you're saying you can just steep grains without using any extract? How do you keep your temps stable to have a good mash? Do you have any links to this method? Or book references? I appreciate your response!
Steeping your grains is all there is to it. You still have your specialty roasted grains, but instead of base extract you use a 'base grain'.
I got the basic process from http://www.amazon.com/True-Brews-Craft-Fermented-Kombucha/dp.... As a bonus, it also has instructions for mead, sake, kombucha, soda, fruit wines, and kefir. Each section includes a 'master' recipe and then 4 or 5 specific recipes. After a couple of batches, you will start making your own recipes without even thinking about it. I usually get 10 or 11 bottles from a batch, which is perfect for me. I'm not a daily drinker. The watermelon/mint soda combined with a good gin is dangerously good though, watch out for it.
The book uses the two-pot method that pyoung talks about. With such a small volume of water, the temperature is pretty stable, especially if you use gas. I found that the efficiency was a little lower than what I was used to, so I just used a little bit more grain, which increased my batch costs by about 25 cents. I ended up using a small sports cooler that I already had around - I wrap it in a towel and it stays remarkably stable, plus it has a spout on the bottom that makes sparging easier.
You can get a good amount of conversion just from steeping. A lot of the extract brew kits use unmilled grain, which is good for shelf life but bad for conversion (but still adds flavor), which is probably where you got the impression that steeping doesn't work. I think the primary reason for needing a mash tun is to handle the volume of grain needed for 5+ gallons of brew. If you are brewing less than that, you can get away with steeping in the brew pot, and equipment permitting, sparge using a colander or grain bag. Just add a little extra grain to account for conversion losses.
From my experience, you only loose a few degrees of temp over the hour of steeping in the boil kettle. I usually put a towel or two on top of the lid to help retain heat, and if needed, will pour some hot water in from the tea kettle to keep the temp up, but that is rarely needed.
For a quick, hipstery, overview of the gallon batch method go here, I use this method for my gallon brews, and the results have been really good:
http://brooklynbrewshop.com/instructions
I have a buddy in a similar situation as yours (kids, no time to brew). He has a killer setup (15 gallon, all-grain), and his solution was to just cut back to brewing a few times a year, and invite some buddies over to help. I think one gallon brews are best left to people in small apartments or for experimentation. In your situation, I would keep in mind the yield-per-time metric. A 15 gallon brew might take a few hours longer than a gallon brew, but it yields 15x more beers. Gallon brews are a good way to keep your brewing instincts sharp, but it won't keep your fridge full.
Awesome, thanks for the information, I think I'm going to have to try that! :)
Before I sold off my brew equipment (that was a very hard thing to do!) I tried to set something up with my friends where they would store the equipment and I'd come over and brew with them. Amazingly no one wanted to at the time, but to this day they are kicking themselves for not taking advantage of it. I had nice quick-release hoses, a Therminator chiller (that is the one piece of equipment I almost kept, prior to that chilling times were killing me!), an nice 15 gallon polar ware brew pot and I was working on getting either a nice gravity setup or getting a stainless steel fermentor. The latter was in consideration because I'd once bounced a 6 gallon glass carboy off my floor accidentally and split my hands open. Not fun! Man, I miss brewing thinking about all that! :)
EDIT: I think once my kids are just a bit older I might be able to get back to a bigger brew. My kids are 6 and 3 so they still need a lot of attention. But I think once the 3 yo is maybe 6 I could probably do a big brew day again.
Cider instead? WRT leftovers kids like apple juice and slices. Note that residential juicers are often not thermally sized for hour long juice runs so be careful and work in batches.
You can make this painful by growing your yeast from dry culture for days blah blah or just buy one of those smack bags where you break the inner container and let it boot up.
Once you're done, making applejack is just as illegal as operating a still, so just like fight club, don't talk about it.
I started off in the 90s making meads (my advice, avoid meads) and wines and the first time I made beer with some buddies I was somewhat stunned by how complicated it is. So I'm just saying if you want a nice fermented drink that's simpler than beer, its hard to find anything more complicated than beer, so ...
I am curious as to why you recommend avoiding meads? I made a gallon batch (still fermenting though) and it was by far the easiest brew process I have come across. Basically just heat up some water and dump honey in, then transfer to the carboy and add yeast. I think it took all of 20-30 minutes. Scaling up to a 5 gallon batch would add a trivial amount of time. Was it the taste? I tasted it when I transferred to secondary, and it was tolerable (I would compare it to a funky white wine). Or fermentation time (was told that it needs about six months total)?
If time ever became a big constraint for me, I imagine I would just cut my brewing down to a few big beers a year (high gravity or other styles that call for long fermentation) which would keep the carboys full, but would also stretch out the time between brews. And then I would try and mix in some meads or all extract brews.
Meads are possibly the easiest thing you can brew yourself, second only to things that start fermenting when you don't want them to.
The problem is that straight honey mead is just not all that interesting to drink. It usually does have some of the residual honey character - but who wants to drink a pint of diluted honey?
By the time you get around to tweaking recipes that turn out a product most people would like you're either back at the same level of effort or time you'd have to spend making a regular grape wine.
I've made a handful of meads so far and I don't think I'm going to do another one unless I have a specific recipe in mind - maybe a metheglyn or a braggot.
I disagree. I think there's a lot more to mead than "diluted honey." Varietal honey produces different flavors, not to mention all the variations you can produce by adding juices and spices.
It's also one of the few homebrews that can save you money. A good batch of homebrewed beer is often not much cheaper than a good store bought microbrew. Compare this to my local meadery which charges $22 for 750 ml of mead. I can brew 5 gallons (~19,000 ml) of good mead for around $60.
Agreed. I've made many wines, including some from grapes growing wild on my own property. But every time I think about trying to brew beer, I look at all the steps it requires and all the time and just buy a 6-pack of something good instead.
In the U.S. it's impossible (at least where I live) to get a beer that is equivalent to something you get in England. What I'm talking about are the "real ales" of England. You get a beer that is 3% to 4%, fresh as hell, served from a hand drawn pump (a cask), kept, yes, a little warmer than you'd expect in the U.S.
In Minnesota there is nothing compared to that. Some places will try to have a cask, but it's not the same (they usually use some sort of swirler to fake the real cask ale head). Our beers are just too high alcohol and force carbonated, it just isn't the same. When I visit England, I can drink 4 to 6 of these real ales and just have a mild buzz. Try that with a 7% IPA that you get here, doesn't work.
So here's a short list of some of my favorite beers from England. If you get a chance, give them a try! You must have them from a good pub (ask around) and they have to be fresh (they will be at a good pub):
You can definitely get a 'real ale' in the US. It's a shame you can't get it where you live, though. During the summer, there's a place near me that does 'Mother Firkin Thursdays' with a about 10 experimental ales in firkins, most of them around 4% and at 58 degrees. The rest of the year, they just have a few in casks available for the regulars.
Not really into the Cider, thanks for the suggestion though. I brew beer because I like to drink beer :) I don't find brewing too complicated, just very time consuming, time I no longer have now that I have kids.
In case anyone with kids on the way is worried, I can confirm that once they get to a certain age you can rope them in help with the process. Then you get dad-kid time, a more fun brew and the kids get a respect for the brewing process which may help once they're old enough to drink themselves.
Went in on one of these with some friends and we've done 3 brews so far with it (nothing is drinkable yet). Prior to getting the machine, we did a few brews the traditional way to better understand the process.
In terms of the amount of time to brew, the biggest difference with the PicoBrew and traditional methods is that during the process we don't have to constantly monitor and adjust, the machine does that for us.
Some of the cleaning is simpler since most of the PicoBrew parts are dishwasher safe, but the kegs still need to be cleaned, bottles prepped, etc...
The thing we're most excited about is that the high-degree of control and repeatability means that we can tweak small things and know that the rest of the process remains consistent.
Meh... As someone who worked on a counter-top beer brewing appliance for my senior design project, I can tell you this thing doesn't produce good beer.
The picobrew is spargeless and is also a single-vessel system which does not stay true to the traditional beer brewing process, meaning the quality of the beer is significantly lowered.
Not to mention half the fun of brewing beer is being involved in the process itself. Adding hops and other ingredients when necessary and being creative by introducing your own ingredients into the process.
When we worked on our senior design project, our market research told us exactly that. People want to be involved in the beer brewing process. Another issue we had was the volume of the yield. With a counter top appliance, you can only get so much power out of a single wall outlet/socket, so your heating element is limited as to the amount of volume of water it can actually heat.
Brewing beer generally takes about 3 hours, so people tend to brew more than 2-3 gallons. The picobrew's yield is 9.4 liters (2.5 gallons), and it is also spargeless and single-vessel so its target market isn't really people who like brewing beer. It's people who've never brewed beer, and are just going to buy a flashy toy which will rarely get used.
We build an interactive android application that communicated with a netduino microncontroller through a web server. This allowed us to query the microcontroller, which controlled the heating element, water pump, and temperature + float sensors.
All I'm saying is, if a few Georgia Tech undergrads can build a counter-top brewing appliance, someone who does this as a hobby and has some programming experience, could just as easily build a larger scale brewing device with a netduino/arduino microcontroller, a few relays and some sensors.
You can see an automated run of our prototype here
I was listening to an episode of the Jamil show (A homebrew podcast) interviewing Annie Johnson, last years american homebrewer of the year and the brewmaster for PicoBrew. She creates recipes for the machine that users can download, as well as helping to qa / guide the product. She brought in samples from the machine to compare with samples that she brewed traditionally. The hosts (many of whom are respected BJCP judges) were blown away by the quality, and opined that this machine should be banned from brewing competitions because of the advantage it would confer. A link to the episode: http://thebrewingnetwork.com/shows/1068
Everyone's taste is different, of course, but I've had non-sparge beers that I thought were great. My understanding was that a sparge increased efficiency; are you saying that the sparge results in a different chemical composition?
Of course, if you sparge with different temp water that would make a difference, but how is that different from a step mash with no sparge?
I always thought that the key was to mash with an appropriate volume of liquor (or 'water' for those that don't enjoy the brewing jargon): if you chuck all the liquor in (full-volume mashing I think it's called), the thin mash means that there's less contact between the enzymes and the starches which I would expect to result in a different chemical composition.
Batch sparging on the other hand (following a mash with a regular ratio of liquor/grain - but rather than slowly rinsing the grains with sparge-temperature liquor, you fill your mash tun with your full volume of liquor at sparge temperature) may affect efficiency (positively or negatively), but shouldn't change the quality.
I've enjoyed some fine batch-sparged beers!
Oh and as for the OP's point about a beer taking three hours... I wish! For me it's more like 8 with all the cleaning and fiddling around in my tiny brewing space!
My first (and only) home brew experience was with a "bag o beer". You put everything in a bag and let it sit for a few weeks.
Well, the bag had a plastic cap on the end. I had it set on the floor of the garage, kinda out of the way.
About a week in, I discovered that it was not REALLY out of the way because I clipped that cap with my shoe as I waked by.
The cap broke off and beer proceeded to spray ALL OVER MY GARAGE. Ceiling, walls, everywhere. We never got the smell of beer out of the garage...I wonder if the people living there can still smell it.
You could have an extremely nice, _real_ brewing setup for less than $1800, including separate refrigeration for fermenting and serving. Not sure what demographic this serves.
My local homebrewer store offers classes at $10/hr so figure for $50/hr you could trivially make an arrangement. Something "uber"-ish where you rent a non-store employee's time would be interesting. May as well have the rented brewer provide his own worm (do they still call them that? The giant copper cooling coil to bring the wort from steep to room temp in an instant using a garden hose?) and other bulky expensive one time only stuff.
I was "drafted" to help some friends on their first beer brew because they knew I was a wine maker, everything went well other than beer is more complicated than I like. Also some winemaker weirdness/hangups about oxidation falls on deaf ears when you drink the stuff mere weeks later, so that was a little weird. Someone who actually knows how to brew could probably make some money if there was only a way to organize the process of match making wanna be beer brewers with real experienced beer brewers.
It would be nice and difficult to background check the contractors and verify their skills (both brewing skills and some minimal level of customer service), and scheduling and billing and customer sat tracking... Sounds like a perfect startup opportunity! Of course, long term growth might be a bit limited compared to "disrupt taxis" or whatever.
That's a pretty good idea. The actual mechanics of brewing beer are exacting and tedious, but have little room for creativity. The most creative part of the endeavor is the recipe.
In fact, many commercial microbrews are partly or wholly made by contract brewers, so this already exists at a larger scale.
The downside is the legal red tape for anything involving alcohol, particularly anything interstate.
It was written to scratch my own itch - I use it to maintain fermentation temperature within a certain range. Especially useful for lagers or brewing ales in the fridge in the Summertime.
It'll also publish metrics to a variety of outputs, with the next release to support Twitter, Librato, and Hosted Graphite.
Hmmm, $1800? I know not of all the apparatuses needed for homebrewing. I'm guessing it's substantially less than this? One would obviously be paying for the convenience of this machine and its ability to brew extremely small batches.
Regardless, I just can't see this "catching on" to any degree with that price. Do they have plans to scale or something?
As a homebrewer $1800 can get you an amazing setup.
It looks to me that the picobrew is for those who don't want to do the 'heavy lifting' of homebrewing and want to say that they homebrew. The automatic bread machine of this generation?
For that price tag you aren't going to get people who want to test out homebrewing. My first homebrew setup was ~$150. This included two buckets (fermentor and bottling), kettle for boiling the wort and hops, bottles, basic bottling accessories, and my first extract kit (fat tire clone).
On the other side they claim this is a professional tool. However, I would highly doubt any real brewery would use this. They have their own pilot systems where they typically make 20-50 gallon test batches. The output of 2.5 gallons is no where near ideal for a test batch. A gallon of beer gets you roughly 10 (12 oz) bottles.
I'm not quite sure who their market actually is. Maybe it's rich people who want to make their own beer? Seems like a small market.
I don't understand where it boils the wort and how it actually mixes these ingredients.
Realistically, anyone who is serious about homebrewing most likely won't be using this. You can get the same amount of control that they advertise with fermentation chambers, your own brewpi, and with detailed logging. Also part of the fun is the actual brew process of boiling the wort and throwing in hops with friends and never having to drink the same beer again.
It'll be interesting to see how this thing actually does.
> It looks to me that the picobrew is for those who don't want to do the 'heavy lifting' of homebrewing and want to say that they homebrew. The automatic bread machine of this generation?
I actually quite enjoy my bread machine. My wife and I both work and are active in our community. It's extremely wonderful to spend 5 minutes before bed and have bread in the morning. It's cheaper than buying bread at the store (ok, the 50¢ loaves give it a run for it's money), and we know exactly whats in it.
Once this comes down in price, which it or something like it will, to the point where it's a few hundred I can see it being used in much the same way by many folks: Good beer is expensive. OK beer is cheap. Home-machine-made beer is better than OK and cheaper.
Depends. For extract brewing you can easily do it for $100-150 if you bottle the beer(with your biggest expense being a large 5+ gallon kettle), adding another $100-150 if you keg.
Full grain brewing is significantly more expensive (unless you do the "Brew in a Bag" style) simple setups easily put you into the $400+ range. Purpose-built full grain brewing systems setup with pumps, three burners and kettles will set you back $2500-5000 depending upon how nice of a setup you get and the volume (15 gallons to 40 gallons), and that doesn't even include the fermentation equipment which for heated and cooled conicals can be $2000+.
Homebrewing has a very active higher end market which is only getting more active as it becomes easier for individuals to move from hobbyist to professional pico/nano/micro-brewer.
All grain isn't that much more expensive. All you need to step up to a full all grain setup is an igloo cooler and a false bottom - ~$100 USD worth of gear.
If you're batch sparging you can use your boil kettle to heat strike, then sparge water. You just need an extra vessel for the first runnings.
Sure, if you really skimp you can do stuff fairly cheap, but if you don't want to go insane with all the juggling you're generally looking at two kettles, and an igloo. They do sell some setups with two igloo's, but then when you're sparging you are either doing batch sparging (which can be a bit tricky to keep the temps right) or you're doing a mash out with water from a separate smaller kettle.
Brewing can certainly be done on the cheap if money is more constrained than time and effort. And there are definitely no shortage of creative ways people have devised to save some money.
My first beer was a 1 gallon batch using a ~$40 kit and normal kitchen supplies. For a "real" 5 gallon all-grain setup, you might spend $250 on equipment (large kettle, burner, wort chiller, bottling or kegging equipment). Then you might want a refrigerator for controlling the fermentation temperature, and maybe another separate one to keep the finished beer at serving temperature. Even with all of this, you're still under $1000.
I'm surprised there isn't mention of the Spiedels Braumeister [1] - it seems to be a similar product (albeit with less tech, and possibly a bit more manual work).
I've heard lots of good things about them, but the price has always put me off, though it is comparable to the PicoBrew, at least here in the UK.
I think they require a bit more interaction if you want to sparge (from my cursory internet forum research performed just now [2]) but at least you can (batch) sparge, and create recipes that would scale up to your big rig if you desired (and had a big rig and space etc).
Yeah, but this isn't to produce a drinkable brew. It's not even a super different projection from the brew time when I've homebrewed (which has been a while but was probably closer to 6 hours for me to get it into the primary fermentation tub). This thing looks pretty cool, but I'm interested in seeing more on the whole setup / maintenance and, especially, cleaning.
