I have a simple rule in my brewery: If it makes demonstrably better beer it stays, if it doesn't it goes over the railing. More importantly, there needs to be a
very compelling reason to change anything.
To this end, I've arrived at my current configuration.
1) After decades of using various temperature control methods to avoid buying dedicated fridges, I've settled upon using two small beverage cooler fridges. I pissed away a shameful amount of money trying to avoid this configuration. I would've saved so much money if I had simply bought a couple of fridges at the start. They stay, they're critical to making excellent beer. At a buck fifty each, plus another forty for dedicated controllers and dip tubes to get the probes directly into the vessel, they're the best money I've spent on my brewery.
2) The
Apera pH 60. This is by far the easiest pH meter I've ever used and I've used many supposedly high-quality meters. When I bought mine, it was fifty-nine bucks. It's a shame it's so expensive now, but it's worth every penny. It's a brilliant piece of kit and being able to track and adjust your pH from strike, runoff, pre-boil, post-boil, and post-fermentation gives you so, so much ability to fine tune the beer in your glass. It's not a cheap piece of kit, but it isn't expensive either. You'll make much, much better beer if you can track and adjust your pH from the tun, into the kettle, into the fermenter, and into the keg. It makes a huge difference.
3) After years of UK-style underlet mashing in a cooler, my Pandemic project to make excellent fizzy yellow swill prompted me to go back to fly sparging, but this time with a submerged sparge manifold. This resulted in much better beer across the board. Initially, it was a pain in the butt, but now that I've learned how to effectively clean my new tun, it's actually easier. It makes better beer, so it stays.
4) After decades of using two glass 6.5gal carboys--gloriously easy to clean with bleach!--I bought a couple of SS Brewtech Brewbuckets because they make closed pressure transfers easy and produce far superior beer. They're a lot more complicated than my old glass carboys, but they make better beer. They stay--phew!!! Huge gamble on that one! I do miss the easy maintenance on my glass carboys.
4a) Kegging, this doesn't require explanation.
5) LODO, it's cheap and easy. It makes better beer. It stays. Also, going LODO doesn't mean you have to go whole hog on the LODO to see results, I still use my copper immersion chiller because it does a fantastic job and I'm hard pressed to think that a stainless immersion chiller will make better beer. I'm currently very content with my rig, so I see no need to dump 200 bucks into a new chiller. Yeast oxygen scavenging and trifecta are easy and cheap to use, a submerged sparge manifold isn't terribly costly. Combined, they make much better beer. LODO is cheap, easy, and effective--aside from the chiller, but I don't think that's really needed to see the results.
6) A pair of cheap pumps. I use a
Mk. II pump for recirculation for whirlpool and recirculation duties (the submerged sparge manifold does double duty in this application [Amazon has the same pump B3 sells, but often has it cheaper and with a stainless head, hence the link]). I also use an immersion pump like
this to pump out of a bucket filled with ice water during the summer months to quickly
chill my wort. Both are cheap and they make better beer. They also make the brew day a lot easier. Cleaning your brewing pump is stupidly easy, you just hook it up to your faucet and run water through it in reverse. I still frequently take the head off after a brew day, but there's never anything in there. Pumps are cheap and easy to use. Use them!
With that said, I've been brewing for over thirty years, and I can assure you that the much more expensive and complex rig that I use today is far, far superior than my old rig. My original rig made a substance that tasted sorta like beer. My current rig allows me to make *exactly* the kind of beer that I want to drink.
The expense and complexity are worth it and if you absorb the cost over a period of decades, well, it isn't all that expensive.
