BYO Magazine March-April Issue
Wow, one year of BYO/Magazine reviews. Good thing I have all the extra time to read the magazines, and then type up my opinion, sheesh…
Cool cover by the way. Anyway, I know this is a little weird, but the ad on page 7 – SOLD! It is for the new Blichmann BoilerMaker brew kettle/mash tun and it is sick, and sick expensive. New metal homebrew wet dream for me, – now get that imagery out of your head, gross. Mr. Wizard’s article touched on specific specialty grains and I thought it was cool, but I wanted more. It is one of those questions where I understand the descriptors used to explain what a certain grain will do to my brew but I’d rather understand the grain, not just the descriptors.
The article ‘Hop Survival Guide’ by Chris Colby (good job Chris on this one) was pretty good and covered a couple different aspects of our 2008 hop crunch. There was hop substitutions presented, hop charts, new hops, and growing hops – that’s a bunch! The Homebrew Hop Guide center-fold was pretty useful if your looking for a quick reference on hops, I believe BYO has it posted on their website. And the Hop Growing article was short and sweet, though reminded me I need to be on top of my stuff this year for planting hops (and thanks to Garrett for the reminder too).
A couple pages later there was a neat idea for an article that fell short with no real numbers. Normally I am not a numbers guy for homebrew stuff, but some numbers would have seriously helped this article on the differences between batch sparging and fly sparging and the benefits and down falls of each. He basically explained it in words, which is fine, but I can read books too. I would have rather he said something along the lines of I brewed 10 batches and this is what my results showed or something.
Other than that I kind of drifted through the rest of the mag falling to slow down only on the short article of a fun sounding homebrew club up in Oxford, PA, the LCD Brewing Co. Until next time.
March 13th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
There are actually more things I dislike about the new Blichmann kettles than I like – I think I’ll be sticking with one of MoreBeer’s heavy-duty modified 26 gallon kettles, instead of opting for the Blichmann 30 gallon equivalent.
Yeah, they look nice – but the evaluation of “function” over “form” didn’t stack up for me. They’d make a pretty nice (albeit pricey) mashtun, but as a boil kettle they’ve got some design issues (IMO).
March 13th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Huh, this will have to be one of the first times I’ve had to disagree with you.
March 13th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
I’ll enumerate you my reasons why as a kettle I’d have problems with it, and I’ll be the first to admit somewhat of a prejudice against Blichmann… (Although I *DO* want a Therminator…)
(1) The site glass will fill with break and protein after just a couple of boils – and from the looks of things, it will be a royal pain to get in there and clean it out. Yes, it comes with a long thin brush (kind of like one for cleaning diptubes), but I feel like its just an added complication. When the wort is boiling and full of steam bubbles, the level won’t read right anyhow… which makes it good for taking readings only while sparging or after the boil is over and you’ve removed your immersion chiller.
(2) The false bottom sits very low in the kettle on that lip, and guarenteed that a good portion of the hot & cold break that settles out will get sucked up through the tube and find its way to the fermenter. Even with a layer of whole hops filtering it out, the volume under the false bottom and the siphon efffect will pull a good quantity of it thru. I get pretty clear wort most of the time, and one of the big reasons is the 1/2″ of dead space below the valve… that’s where all the cold break settles to (that isn’t removed by the hops)
(3) Lastly, and maybe I’m just being snobbish here – Weldless fittings. For almost $600 (30 gallon model), I’d expect more than weldless. The thought of gaskets leaking or degrading over time from the heating and cooling cycles scares me. It just feels kind of cheap.
I’ll admit its pretty sleek looking, but these three things I just couldn’t get past for the kind of price point it has. A comparable MoreBeer kettle is in the $400 range.
August 4th, 2008 at 11:04 am
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