First State Brewers' Blog

HDYB has scaled back their store hours to just Thursday thru Saturday again. I loved their Wednesday-Sunday schedule, but they must not get enough Wed & Sun business to stay open that much. Oh well... Must wait one more day to find out when my Servomyces is coming in.

My Crankandstein 3D-CGM mill came Monday. The thing is a beast - the mill alone weighs 13 lb, solid steel. I haven't actually milled anything with it yet (waiting on the Servomyces to go to HDYB), but I did a test run with my drill... its gonna be sweet. There are settings that you can "click" the rollers into place with (like 9 settings), or if you want something outside the normal 0.025" - 0.065" gaps, you can even do more than that (without the 0.005" detent stops). I still need to set it up w/ maybe a stand or something... and I'm also wondering if I should motorize.

The mill is my first step towards cutting batch costs - now I can buy whole grains and keep them for many months - which means I can buy bigger. In addition I'll be going all-grain in May, and this mill will allow me to get 50lb bags of base malt and brew whenever I feel like it - SO LONG EXTRACT!! BWAA AHAA HAA HAAA!!!

I did some math and doing an all-grain batch will save about 50% on the fermentables side of things... granted some things, like hops and yeast are just fixed costs per batch... but not paying upwards of $2/lb for extract is going to be nice.

I'm also looking forward to having more control over my fermentables ratio - Making big beers w/ extract sucks b/c you can pretty much guarentee a high finishing gravity unless you start subbing out the malt extract for other sugars... So, you either live with the higher FG and hop the hell out of it to compensate (which doesn't really work well for all styles), sub out for different sugars... or you live with strong, sweet beer. I am not happy with any of these alternatives, so a-mashing I will go... a-mashing I will go...