Part of transitioning from extract brewing to all-grain brewing is gaining (read: buying ) more equipment.  It is easy to do if you have lots of cash money to throw around, but if you are like me, you tend not to be so extravagant with your spending (no comments from the wife, please).  Eric and I are piecing together our all-grain brew equipment one tank and burner at a time.  Because of this, I have had lots of time to think about what we need.  I thought I would review what I (currently) see as important to have in the three main brewing vessels. Hot Liquor Tank - The HLT is used for holding hot water for mashing (that's a brewer's word; common parlance would be "soaking" or "steeping") the grains and then for sparging (another brewing term; it's really just rinsing the grains of sugars that are left behind). Ideally, HLTs should hold as much liquid as your mash tun, but a little less is ok.  Grains do take up some volume in your mash...

When I first started, brewing was all I could think about.  It is all I wanted to talk about.  I would spend hours thinking of what next to brew, researching equipment upgrades, learning, reading - just trying to soak it all in.  As my wife would attest, I tend to jump into things with both feet. The problem I ran into was there wasn't anyone available, reliable, and knowledgeable I could interact with and actually hear their input on brewing beer.  Sure, I had books on beer, but those can only take you so far.  My brewing buddy was just as much of a newbie as I was, so that wasn't going to help me progress (though, we did talk a lot about brewing anyway).  The homebrew club only met monthly.  And internet forums, well, you know how the internet is.  There is lots of good info and there is lots of craptacular info.  Wading through all of it, finding stuff that was reliable and applicable, that was a chore and it took a long time t...

A lot of things go into making a good beer.  There is the obvious - the malt and the hops; there is the process and procedure - how long did you mash/boil/hop, etc.; there is the cleanliness and sanitation - no funky bugs in the beer.  All of these can be tweaked one way or another and changing just one thing will give a different tasting beer than before. Working on recipes, one often wants to improve or change a little piece to see what happens.  And one of the difficulties is having to brew an entirely new batch of beer to change one hop addition or to mash four degrees higher.  But, there is one ingredient that can be used several times from one batch of wort.  And that ingredient, is yeast. Yeast, arguably, is the most important ingredient in beer.  Without yeast, one does not have beer at all.  And, to be honest, it isn't really an "ingredient" at all, but rather a living organism that takes your sugar-sludge and turn it into delicious beer...