Beer is less difficult to make than cake, I’d say. Takes longer is all.
You are describing the Picobrew Zymatic.
What I’ve been using is just 3 gallon carboys, mostly plastic. The immersion circulator for steeping. And standard BIAB tools.
If you wanna keep the circulator cheap monoprice makes one for $75, the anovas are frequently on sale for less than $100 dollars.
If you keg there are 3 gallon cornie kegs. What i’m gifting is a 1.75g canonball keg. Designed so they can be stacked. 3 fill the same foot print as a 20 liter and are close on capacity.
5 gallon looks like it’s on the way out. Serious guys go 10+ because the ecconomy of scale is better and the difficulty is ok with that much beer.
5 gallon is as much a pain in the as 10 for less beer.
3 makes things so easy to deal with you end up brewing more often if you want more beer. So hobbyist like myself have have all be switching. I actually didn’t like brewing much at 5 gallons. Not worth the trouble. Picked up 3 gallon stuff to do a meed. And well now I actually want to brew again instead of thinking “I should use all that stuff I bought”.
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For $2000 USD plus a Windows computer, I’ll happily stick to not brewing (or do it the old-fashioned way on a smaller scale than I used to). Looks pretty great, though.
My point exactly. Thanks for the info on 3-gallon brewing. Might just give it a go.
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After having gone already in a past life through the buying of bulky pots and carboys only for them to end up little used in storage, I resolved to develop a way to brew using as much stuff we already had as possible and in as small a space as possible. I did gallon batches; my goal was to not ramp up to 5 gallons until I could get good beer consistently (got good beer, but never consistently enough); nothing more demoralizing than all the effort it takes to bottle 5 gallons of beer that’s crap you don’t want to drink, and for those of us who have trouble lifting a lot just the thought of doing 5 gallons gives me pain. I bought cheap Carlo Rossi wine for their gallon glass jugs, boiled in our 6 quart pressure cooker, cooled in ice in the sink, instead of kegs or bottles I bottled in 1 or 2 liter pop bottles. The limited mash/boil volume meant usually needing to aim for a higher gravity and then diluting, but that’s just a matter of using the calculators.
The other thing I’ve done that the space-challenged might find interesting is simply extract only, no boiling. I sterilized the water, mixed in extract like kool-aid, dump in yeast and ferment. As one might imagine, it admittedly it ends up a little dull tasting, but low bitterness styles like wheat and stout can work in this way and you can dry hop for something like a pale ale. And can’t be beat for sheer laziness and space. Probably my least favorite part of brewing is cooling the wort so this accomplishes my goal of eliminating that.
Something worth noting that no one has mentioned, and that’s temp control on the fermentation. If this thing saves you that hassle that’s a point in its favor (though, like others, I kinda don’t see the point of being so hands-off). I think that’s a real stumbling block for a lot of newcomers who don’t have a nice cool basement. (and another pitch for doing gallon batches- you can pick up a mini-fridge for cheap on craigslist instead of a big bulky more expensive chest freezer. A less reliable but cheapest option is that gallon jugs fit nicely in Home Depot buckets with water to adjust and insulate temps)
For temp control I brew seasonally. Kind of puts a cap on how often you brew. But it works.
But one of the cooler things with the small batches is the fermenter will fit in your regular sized fridge without taking up too much of it.
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As others note, the concept is sort of neat. But I’ve gone down the 5 gallon brewing path before. Yeah, brewing is a messy endeavor. Plastic 5 gallon “Better Bottles” (if I recall the name correctly) made the process easier and safer. 5 gallon glass carboys are heavy and sort of fragile. But you have to ask yourself are there no good microbreweries near, that you could drive a growler to? In my case the answer was I’d have to really like the process to continue making it myself.
I AM a brewer - also at a brewery. Dirty equipment will not SKUNK it, UV rays do that. Dirty equipment, botched brews, old ingredients, time etc., etc., will give you a plethora of other horrible off flavors but actual 3 MBT is not one of them.
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Ah, so it seems my native English does not extend to brewing. I thought skunking was any sort of spoilage.
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I don’t think anyone is brewing to get better beer these days. That was the original idea, when the best you could get at the American market was some regional hold out like Yeungling, Gansett, or Genny Creme. Unless you stepped up to hard to find imports. But frankly its not 1977 anymore. And even where as a decade ago, when I ran off my first batch, you could say you were getting better beer slightly cheaper than buying it. There’s a gas station not far from me these days selling better beer than I’ll ever be capable of brewing at a fair price.
People don’t pick up hobbies for purely utilitarian reasons. You might as well be saying “why cook yourself dinner, there’s a perfectly good take out place just around the block”.
Also growlers are a dying segment. My retail accounts tell me their growler stations are down 80% over the past 2 years. Breweries I work with make far, far, far more off fresh canned beer. And the only places I know with strong fresh filled sales are running crowler stations.
Having spent a fuck ton of time professionally tasting beers the last couple of years. I’m not a particularly good home brewer. But I make better beer, most of the time, than the vast majority of microbreweries out there. When every town has 12 breweries, the chances that any given brewery is making decent product is pretty low. Lotta sloppy technique and QC right now. One of our brands. A well regarded nationally distributed one. Some how shipped a keg of cleaning solution. I don’t even know how that happens, there isn’t really a part of the commercial brewing process that involves filling kegs to the top with water and bleach. And yet there it was, pouring pitcher after pitcher as my coworker attempted to explain why the brand new expensive keg was just water.
Ah. OK. Skunked refers to the specific kind of spoilage that comes with exposure to sunlight. So named because it tastes the way a skunk smells. Best example is probably Moosehead out of Canada. Its always skunked. Powerful skunked.
More available globally Heineken. Green bottles let UV light in, and the hop level makes it easy to Skunk. Apparently the brand wants it skunked as the Heineken enthusiast prefers that flavor. And you’ll occasionally see people talking about doing shit like “aging” bottles of it on hot window sills to get that “green bottle flavor”. But if you’ve ever had a Heineken, and didn’t like it. The part you didn’t like. Skunked.
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Holy crap. Having worked the keg line (Fasskeller/Fassabfüllerei), I cannot imagine what happened there. Most keg cleaning machines have the keg upside down when it moves through the stations: the cleanser is sprayed in, and gravity lets it flow out.
Actually, I can now figure it out. Some idiot filled a keg when the filling station was supposed to be in a washing cycle, and let the keg go out. Which means a massive, massive brain fart right there. At the brewery where I worked, we had a sort of pseudo-keg that went in at the end of the day, so that the detergents and rinse water could flow back into the tanks, but it did not look like a keg. It was a pipe that you hooked to a hose leading back to the cleaning system.
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I still occasionally come across a microbrew that I could beat as a homebrewer, but it’s rare. And I made some very successful batches (along with some not-so-successful ones). When I started, in the mid-80s, the Canadian microbrew scene was in its infancy and it was not especially difficult to do better than most, though out of the gate there were a few that were excellent. Some tasted like, and probably were, industrial-scale versions of beginners’ kits.
Today I have easy access to beer from dozens of breweries, many of them excellent. If I find a mediocre one my response is not to go make beer, but just to avoid that brewery.
Ironically, one reason I stopped brewing was that I reached a place in life where I could afford to just buy quality beer. Now the best beer is expensive again, and here I am thinking of getting back into brewing… but there is still perfectly good beer at the affordable end of the microbrew market, so it’s a little different from the situation in the 80s.
The main reason I took up brewing was that I was a 20-year-old student, and 25-cent-a-bottle beer had a strong appeal. The appreciation for the craft of it, and striving to make really high-quality brews, came later.
Started with simple kits, by the time I was done I was messing with water chemistry, mashing carefully measured recipes, going out of my way to source the appropriate hops, buying high-end yeast cultures, maybe souring part of the wort to put the finishing touch on my Guinness clone… (BTW, I think yeast is the single biggest improvement a kit brewer can make… ditch the little included pouch and buy a liquid culture suited to the style of beer in question, see an instant leap in quality.)
Upthread I confessed to being a snob about concentrates vs. mashing, but the truth is that’s some major hypocrisy because I started out as one of those guys with a can opener and a plastic bucket. It was only in retrospect that I didn’t see it as proper brewing. In other words, a true and proper snob. 
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That makes sense. Part of the confusion was that the keg wasn’t full of line cleaner or brewery wash. But bleach and water. So if they were sanitizing the keg station that could be the explanation.
I had assumed they must have filled the keg to flush out some draft equipment and it got “lost” in the keg room. You can fill standard kegs with cleaner and then just push it over co2 to clean lines and jockey boxes. Brewery in question is a large, large professional operation with a big tasting room. So they have pumps and recirculators for cleaning their draft lines. But American craft breweries tend to have a lot of jockey boxes for events and festivals. And they’re kind of a pain to clean. So if you got kegs around, a half barrel of cleaner or sanitizer would be more useful than a hose or cleaning can. And it’s probably not worth it to hook them up to a pump.
Brewery in question is weird. They’re huge and make very good beer. But there’s a lot of weird and unprofessional going on. At least once a month we get a mislabeled pallet of kegs from them. Expensive limited release IPAs mislabeled as their cheap core stout etc. We don’t get quality problems from them, spoiled or infected beer, busted kegs etc. Just really weird organization issues.
Canada might be looking at a slightly different situation than the US. There are currently 7,000 some odd breweries operating in the US. 6,500 or so are craft, a good proportion being microbrew. Pennsylvania alone has more breweries than Germany. And at any given moment 100’s more are opening. And there are thousands of additional brands that are contract brewed by companies with no interest in operating their own breweries.
Every town in the US having 12 breweries isn’t an exaggeration. And there’s just a lot of bullshit beer out there. Many of these places coast on being local, and aren’t too concerned about quality. Or coast on trends like designy 16oz collectable cans. Obvious brewing flaws abound. Usually from poor temp control and short conditioning times. Consistency is a real issue.
A company I know, farm to table food purveyor. Spent millions opening a massive cidery. Their production floor is the size of an airport hanger. And yet they make nothing in house. All their equipment sits idle. Everything is contract brewed at the same Upstate NY contract facility that makes most of the cider brands on the East Coast, and it tastes exactly like all those brands. I asked the guy who runs the place why the hell they’d build that brewery just to sit there. And he tells me the “real money” is in the tasting room. That what they’re selling doesn’t matter, people will pay through the nose to drink in a warehouse on a farm field. They’re basically using their brewing license to operate a low overhead bar/tourist attraction.
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The density of breweries is greater there, but not by as much as you might think. There about 150 breweries of all types here in Quebec (pop. ~8 million), including everything from Molson-Coors to neighbourhood brew pubs. 150/8 million (19 breweries per million people) is fewer per capita than 7000/300 million (23 per million) but arguably it’s in the same ballpark.
I’ll bet the distribution of poor-ordinary-great is pretty similar most everywhere and not far from a normal distribution.
I haven’t encountered many truly terrible ones among the small operations, but there are some I avoid simply because they’re in the business of providing off-brand alternatives to Molson and Labatt (in some cases, these budget micros may actually be owned by a major but leave that fact obscured). The majors suck as much as in the US, stubborn Canadian mythology notwithstanding. And there are a handful of truly great breweries here.
Often, mediocrity comes in the form of a brewpub, because they can sometimes coast on convenience and ambiance. There’s even a French (Alsatian) chain, Les 3 Brasseurs, with a strong presence here (as well as Ontario, about 25 locations in all). The beer is decidedly pedestrian, but it seems to work for them.
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That just breaks my heart. It’s a terrible waste of equipment, unless they bought the cheap Asian catalog stuff for show.
I would kill to have my own properly set up mini brewing space to make beer in. This story just guts me. I do brew at a small family brewery, but it is just that. We are not properly set up and brewing is much, much harder than it should be. I have collaborated at over half a dozen breweries, and wow. I long for a more properly created brewing space.
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Hahahahahahaaa!
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Sounds like a brewing example of the old military adage that amateurs study tactics (well, in this case - brewing), professionals study logistics. 
There’s nothing mini about their settup. It’s multiple 120bbl fermenters. The building is a large warehouse. It doesn’t make a ton of sense.
There’s nothing particularly amateur about these guys. Been in the business for 25 years. Their beer is probably on the shelf in your local supermarket. They even export to Europe last I checked.
I think they just smoke a lot of pot, and they’ve recently been scrambling to relaunch/reset the brand after they sort of fell behind the times. Started canning and resigned everything so packaging looks less like your uncle’s metal band.
Craft beer has changed significantly the last 10 years. And the older set of craft Brewers are used to doing things in a more… Casual way. If that makes sense. Everythings sort of moving away from the middle aged white guys, backyard jam band mentality, aethetic and the grab ass almost hobby level a lot of these businesses have been run since the 80s.
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I didn’t mean it seriously.
There is a difference though between firms like the one you mention and, say, Heineken which could (uncharitably) be described as a logistics business with some brewery businesses attached.
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