I started homebrewing in 2013 when my wife bought me some BIAB equipment for my first Father’s Day. I was interested in managing the quality of every ingredient in addition to the process. I started with all-grain batches, reasoning that I could finally have a beer with a simple and trustworthy set of ingredients.
As a first batch, my friend Nick and I took an embarrassing 12 hours (from setup to cleanup) to brew a Belgian blonde. Sticking with pure and unprocessed ingredients, we bottle conditioned it with honey and waited several weeks for the results. As the first two bottles hissed open we proudly patted ourselves on the back and exclaimed “holy $h!t, we made beer, it’s actually beer!”. It wasn’t – at least not by today’s standard. However, we were bitten by the craft beer bug and rapidly outgrow the rather unsafe BIAB rig that we started with. At the same time, we outgrew 5 gallon batches – and outgrew brewing outdoors in the cold Ontario winter. It was time to move the rig inside, increase capacity and add quality controls.
Learning about as many rigs and methods as possible, I concluded that a recirculation system was the most practical brewhouse. The process and mechanics are simple and the capacity is scalable. The end result is a semi-automated indoor brewery that lets us focus on quality and consistency to make beer that is as fresh, pure and as delicious as it can be.