Begin Brewing!

In extract brewing, there is no mash step. The brewer may choose to steep some specialty grains to grain the flavors they offer, but the mashing was done by whoever created the malt extract used to produce the beer. The benefit of extract brewing is that you save time and don't need as much equipment. The down-side is that you have less control over the flavor of your beer. For all-grain brewers, it's all about the mash. This is analogous to extract brewing's steeping and stirring in of malt extract, but is considerably more complicated. I won't go into all the complexities here, because to be quite honest I doubt I know or understand them all. There are a number of ways to perform a mash. These include: Decoction mashing: A portion of the mash is drawn off and boiled in a separate vessel, then added to the mash tun to heat it up. In this style of mashing, there's no heat applied to the main mash vessel - only to the portion drawn off and heated separatel...

When the IMake company ran its Kickstarter campaign to bring The Grainfather into the United States, I was considering making the switch from extract to all-grain brewing.  I'd been looking at the Speidel Braumeister, the Zymatic Picobrew, and some other all-in-one systems.  I came to the conclusion that what I wanted was: The ability to brew 5-gallon all-grain batches of beer Use of electric heating rather than gas, to allow indoor brewing year-round Relative ease of use If possible, an "all-in-one" system.  If not, as few points of failure as possible. The Grainfather met these requirements quite well, at a Kickstarter cost of $840.  Other products I'd been looking at had more bells and whistles, but were priced at least twice that.  So I took the risk that the Kickstarter would fall through and paid my money for the Grainfather.  The device arrived in August 2015. I spent my first few weeks getting to know it, and not actually brewing anyth...