Resurrecting an old thread for my first post here is probably bad form, but...
I'm transitioning from extract to all-grain soon, been using a bargain basement kettle for that. I'm looking at the SS BrewTech 15 gallon for AG, and stumbled upon a couple of threads here in my searches that brought the Spike into the mix. Several posts seem to imply that the Spike was cheaper...that does not seem to be the case, maybe it was in 2015 but is not in June 2016.
* SS 15, including ball valve and dip tube, is $230
* Spike, with neither of those, is $240. Adding Spike's ball valve and the dip tube setup mentioned earlier in this thread adds roughly another $45-50 to the total, so it's looking more like $285-290.
So given this pricing, is the Spike really $55-60 better than the SS? Do the welded fittings make it that much "better"? Do the weldless fittings always eventually leak or something?
Thanks.