upgrading

Just got on board with the home brewing and have my first batch (from a kit) in the bottling phase for another 2 weeks and fairly confident that it will taste like it should. My next batch is on the horizon and am thinking about brewing a blueberry porter that i found on this forum. I have a couple of questions 1 Am i ready to dive in and just get all the ingredients separately or should i do one more kit? 2 Forget this bottling stuff looking to upgrade to a kegerator system and wanted to know what kegging system has worked for everybody. Thinking lo scale 5 gal batches and corny kegs?

longroad said:

Just got on board with the home brewing and have my first batch (from a kit) in the bottling phase for another 2 weeks and fairly confident that it will taste like it should. My next batch is on the horizon and am thinking about brewing a blueberry porter that i found on this forum. I have a couple of questions 1 Am i ready to dive in and just get all the ingredients separately or should i do one more kit? 2 Forget this bottling stuff looking to upgrade to a kegerator system and wanted to know what kegging system has worked for everybody. Thinking lo scale 5 gal batches and corny kegs?

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That's the way I did it. One kit, decided it was the hobby for me, then immediately upgraded to all-grain and a kegging system. Bottling sucks. It's good to have a bottling system in place for competitions though, or for transportation to an event perhaps. I like to plan ahead and do a bottled beer once every 5 kegs or so. Do you want to do extract, partial, or all-grain?

I just bought a new fermentation chest freezer and while I was there, I saw a sale at Lowe's for a great kegerator freezer. If you use this coupon code, 470211458612812, during checkout for the Frigidaire 14.8 cu ft Chest Freezer, it's $355 delivered. Deal ends on the 9th. If you want a smaller system, they've also got the 7 cft. Holiday freezer which would be 153.90. That 7 would probably hold 3-4 kegs. The 14.8 will hold 9 cornies.

If you are seriously thinking about buying a kegerator, these deals will be hard to beat unless you luck into something used on craigslist. That 14.8 is like $250 off, delivered. There are threads on here, or I can give you details on turning it into a keezer, it's easy and takes only a few minutes.

I would encourage you to brew several more times before upgrading and investing a lot of money in it. I have had a couple friends brew once, invest, then get bored and move on after a couple more batches. But yes, kegging simplifies a lot of things and eases workload too. Think about moving to all grain as well as it lowers cost per batch and allows a little more control. Also, think about upgrading to a 10 gallon brew system as you get twice as much for barely any more work. Those are good steps to take early on.