The Beginning, (of a long journey)
If you read all my #build posts you'll undoubtedly think 'man, this is way too hard' and ask yourself 'why didn't he just buy a Grainfather?'.
This is the post that answers that question.
It started back in 2016 when Jo and I decided to leave the our frantic life in the UK and return to New Zealand to be closer to family. Jo grew up in Dunedin and I grew up farther south in Invercargill at the bottom of the Mainland, so we weighed the pros and cons and agreed to live in the South Island again heading back to Dunedin with 2 young kids in tow.
I had worked in the IT industry since 1998 so was looking for something new to do and with the funds from selling our home in Newbury I was thinking about buying a running business when I spotted McDuff's Brewery for sale. It's gone now but at the time this was a well established Dunedin brewery that had started as a Brew Pub in the 90's and latter moved to stand alone premises.
I was working through an commercial real estate agent who provided me with a copy of a valuation that had been prepared in 2012 and the financials for the previous year. I reviewed these and quickly realized a few things:
- It looked like it had been on the market for a few years - alarm bells?
- The equipment (much of it manufactured in 1992) looked kinda expensive compared to the price I could purchase similar equipment from Alibaba
- In the end I realised I didn't know enough about the brewing process and the commercial realities of running a brewery to really assess the business's value.
So I walked away and dived head first into a totally different business endeavour. One thing for sure though was that I was now hooked on the idea of home brewing so resolved to build one and learn all I could so I'd be ready for the next opportunity or to step out and build a commercial brewery of my own one day.
So I started googling, and looking back now I don't recall seeing any All-In-One systems like the Grainfather on the market at the time but was digging around in forums, blogs, etc, and it seemed that the established route was to either:
- hand craft a 3 tier brew-stand using a Coleman chill box as the mash tun (optionally gravity fed),
- engineer a 3 keggle system like the Brutus 10 or this slightly simpler one Wolfy built , or
- go the full monty and build an Electric Brewery system like the one below (so shiny).
The Electric Brewery option was what I thought I needed, something small enough to run at home, but complete enough from a process perspective to learn the traditional 3 vessel end to end brewing process used by commercial brewers the world over, or so I thought at the time, but shiny "Made in America" stainless steel and control panels are very expensive and shipping to NZ even more so, so it priced itself out of contention.
My learning process involved watching YouTube, crawling forums, plus reading Palmer's 'How to Brew', 'The Microbrewer's Handbook' by Ted Bruning, and 'So You Want to Start a Brewery' by Tony Magee of Lagunita's fame, and a few others.
As I continued to research while building and running my other business, I discovered that there was a third set of options that had begun to emerge on the market sitting between the very analog home built keggle approaches above, and the very expensive Electric Brewery system, in the form of projects like the BrewBot and BrewPi which utilize single board controllers like the Arduino or Raspberry Pi to programmatically monitor and control the fermentation and brewing processes. And they were low cost.
By early 2017 BrewPi Version 2 had already proven itself as a highly functional and stable Fermentation temperature control system with a thriving community and Version 3 was almost ready to enter into production with extended functionality aimed at providing greater control over the end to end brewing process.
Having a background in IT, using software to replace the physical PIDs and switches used in the Electric Brewery design for process monitoring and control seemed like the right way to future proof the system with the added bonus that you could also tweak settings infinitely, automate, and run the whole process remotely or at least from a single touch screen if you wanted to.
By now, I had also learnt that one of the real secrets to producing good home brew consistently is temp control during fermentation. Threads like the two below showed how to build the fermentation control system and hack a fridge to create a fermentation chamber and along with the detailed BrewPi HERMS 1.2 drawing below, and a fully stocked BrewPi Store with all the parts I'd need in one place, my mind was soon made up to build a 3 vessel BrewPi eHERMs system.
So on October 11th 2017 I ordered all the parts I thought I would need, and about two weeks later they cleared NZ customs and arrived in Dunedin via FedEX from the Netherlands. On the 12th I also purchased 3 x 50l StockPots on Trademe, NZ's answer to ebay for $199 ea so now I was ready to go.
Then life got in the way.
The details are complicated, but involved a 2 year stint in Singapore, 6 months in Dubai, arriving back in the UK in Sept 2021 in the middle of Covid19, followed by a year long delay in getting our container of personal effects from NZ to Newbury. By then we had to find a 2nd house to rent with a garage for all the contents of the container so I was only reunited with all the parts for my as-yet unbuilt brewery in May 2022.
Around this time I met my good friend Mike, who inducted me into home brewing with my very first brew on his Grainfather G70 in June 2022. I was now totally hooked and had a burning desire to get the build done and try brewing for myself.
Time to #BUILD
