Yee haw. Well I got out of the brew with grace and style... except for the BK filter... So a few quick answers -
I got around the 25.21 restriction by having a detached garage. I licensed my office on the second floor of my house (location of all records relating to production need to be identified for the Cal. ABC) but got a variance from the TTB for that.
Yup - It's a weekend, evening thing. Actually, now that I've got my process pretty well dialed in, its getting easier and easier. I have a 20 month old daughter so having confidence that my rig will perform as designed has been a blessing and I can go and mess with her intermittently. It takes about 8 hours to do a 1bbl so that's important to me.
The biggest lesson learned from the step up to 1bbl: You don't need more knowledge or skill to do the bigger batches, just more stuff. And time. There are some pics of the rig with my smaller kettles in my profile. Its about the same, except its got 55g kettles on it now. Assistant Brewer/Wonderdog Gordie is featured in the foreground...
Cooling was a pain - the brew threw so much protein that the BK filter slowed to almost nothing and my counterflow chiller was almost useless. On the advice of the Blichmann manual, instead of using their BK screen I used a coarse steel-wool pad. It was worse than useless. I eventually had to drain off some wort into my fermentors to lower the level enough to get some tongs and rip the steel wool off and finish cooling the wort.
Next time I'm going to make a few changes - first, I'm going to hit ACE hardware and get some copper tubing and rig a whirlpool return for when I'm cooling. Second - I'm going to whole leaf hops from now on. I'm not confident that I'm going be able to get an effective screen for that volume of wort going through that sized port and the leaf hops can help as a coarse filter. The pellet hops/hop bag worked great at 15g of wort but now that I'm throwing at least a pound of hops in the boil the hop dust that gets out of the bag is substantial.
Also - yeast becomes different. Bigger starter that won't fit on a stir plate, so rethinking that was one of those "planning things" that never really seem to be done early enough. I stir plated about 1.8 liters and then pitched that into some more slurry and some more 1.040 wort and let it rise to krausen. It looked happy so I figure I did what I could. Seriously aerating 33g of wort is a must, so this was the maiden voyage of my in-line aerator - a 2 micron stone in a stainless T (conveniently available from More Beer...). We'll see how it goes.
I'm also using sanke kegs as fermentors so I had to rig blow off tubes, which I hadn't been doing. I'm a little nervous about putting 15 gal of wort in a 15.5 gal vessel but maybe I'll just have an easier time cleaning the krausen line. I had been using the 15g sankes to ferment 12-13 gallons and just rigged an airlock but if I can fit a 1bbl batch into two rather than three kegs it will make my life dramatically easier.
Thanks to everyone who followed me on Twitter. My wife, who was the original person who said "why don't you try and make beer?" after I f#$%ed up yet another batch of wine, thought it would be cool. I'm going to try and make it a regular thing. The nanobrewing thing is pretty unique and a great grass-roots "take back the beer" kind of vibe so I'm going to try and figure out how to share what's working for me and what I've screwed up. If anyone has any questions or is in the area and wants to stop by and say hi on a brew day or anything, let me know. Also, I've got a facebook page for Healdsburg Beer Company where I'm going to be putting news and whatnot, so if anyone wants to keep informed become a fan.
Kevin (and Gordie)
Healdsburg Beer Company