This past week I took another step in the Brewing Beer Journey and purchased an electric brew system, the Brewzilla 3.1.1.
As I brewed with the system for the first time on Saturday, I reflected back on my first beer making equipment, an all-in-one starter kit from Northern Brewer.
Premium Craft Brewery in a Box – Beer Making Starter Kit (northernbrewer.com)
This was the perfect start to the Brewing Journey in the sense that I really started from basics and learned about what it takes to make beer. When you have to do everything manually you learn the principle behind it.
I think that if I had started with an all-in-one system to start, I would not have gained the appreciation for the process.
Starting with Extracts and a boil kettle, it was really down to boiling the sugars and adding the hops. This allowed me to concentrate on why I was adding Hops and when. Little did I know but this was valuable to my learning for later creating my own recipes. I learned to concentrate on what I wanted from a specific type of hop by when it was added. In simple terms, the first hop addition is for bittering, the 2nd for taste and the 3rd for aroma.
The next lesson, and probably the most important, was cleaning and sanitation. If you want to brew good beer you have to be OK with lots of cleaning.
Like with most hobbies, the more you learn the more you want to move to the next level. That brought me into venturing into All-Grain brewing. No longer was I going to get the sugars from the grains in a bag or can but I would have to extract them myself.
This opened a whole other trail in the Journey which was wide open. There are so many different things you can do to change the flavor and profile of you home brew in All-Grain. Different grains and adjunct can create any flavor you desire as well as effect the mouth feel of your beer. Temperature at which you “mash” the beer can also greatly influence your beer (along with holding that temperature).
So, I started my upgrade by again ordering more gear from Northern Brewer.
Northern Brewer All Grain Cooler System
This was just as exciting as when I brewed my first batch.
After a year of brewing all grain, I came to appreciate the mash in procedure, holding proper temps and sparging the grains, I really felt I understood the concept.
That is what finally had me convinced that I was ready to get into electric brewing. Now I could spend more time on the recipe and try different aspects of mashing in the grains such as step mashing with different temperatures to change the profile/flavor of the beer.
Again, reflecting back on the Journey, I am glad that I started small and now can enjoy the comforts of electric brewing as I try brewing different beers.
The Brewzilla brew day was a success not only in getting to work with new upgraded equipment but also taking a look back at where the Journey started and how much I had learned over the years.
Cheers,
Mike
