GIusedtoBe said:
starting in all grain.
Thanks,
Al
I too went to the buy it once and be done with it school. If you start with three 15.5 gallon kegs, a couple turkey fryers and some welding gear, you are going to have a "ten gallon system" that has a resale value on ebay, and if you take on a big stout or a big Belgian or a big imperial stout you can still run a five gallon batch in one mash and one boil.
I have taken on a couple recipes already that required two mash events and two boils to get five gallons in the fermenter, and that sucks donkey parts.
With a ten gallon brew house, next on my list would be a 7.5 gallon Sanke keg to use as a primary for beers that will be bottled and aged. A fourth 15.5 gal Sanke keg - with spundle valve*- to use as a fermenter for keg/session beer would be next.
With a live in SO you could make 20 different brews every year (200 gallons), and have 32 other weekends wide open for SO stuff, or car stuff, or whatever.
Currently my brew house runs a five gallon kettle, so I can do 5 gallon steep/ pm / extract batches, or 2.5 gallon AG batches. But I can keg.
Definitely quit bottling and start kegging before you go big on the hot side. Cleaning bottles sucks. Sanitizing botles sucks. Filling bottles sucks. Capping bottles sucks. Giving bottles to my friends is cool. Serving my friends my beer from my kegs, well, you can imagine.
*standby for link thingy, and thank you for serving.
Cliffs: This guy figured out how to carbonate his keg beer while it was fermenting (spundle valve), so he is looking at 3 weeks from grain to glass, and he doesn't have to use CO2 from a tank to get the keg carbed. Depending on your friends...
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=44344