Originally Posted by
Shawn Pixley
I've been brewing since 1984 and win awards to this day. Did anyone ask you to be the brewmaster for a brew pub? (Admittedly I didn't think I was ready for that scale and made a better living doing architecture). I didn't say you couldn't make good beers from grain bags or extract / grain mixes. I did and still can. Others can and do as well. But the limitations of stale or limited choices in a kit is just that, a limitation. You can taste the differences in using say Cascade hops vs say Goldings as the bittering hops even if you get the same IBU's. Most of the new material forms of ingredients like pelleted hops are to address different issues such as convenience or shelf life (not taste). Pellets don't taste as good but are definitely more convenient. With greater exposure to air in pelletizing, some taste is lost. Leaf hops taste better but are much more sensitive to heat and oxygen exposure. They should be refrigerated at all times. Filtering out the various residue from the grain, hops and proteins is not fun and most homebrewers aren't particularly good at it. It shows in the lack of clarity of their beers. For styles such as a Wit, the lack of clarity gets them poor marks in competition. Many home brewers introduce oxygen after fermentation which can create skunky esters in the beer. Dry hopping with pellets is just wrong.
Additionally, If you start with dry yeast you have a much more limited selection of yeasts. Dry yeasts are more shelf-life friendly and they are selected for that attribute, not taste. Moreover, most do not prepare dry yeast properly and end up under-inoculating the wort with yeast. This often produces unpleasant esters. You will taste it in the finished beer.
My point on the bags is that the water temperature in the center of the bag will not be the same as that of the water outside of the bag. This is especially true when you get beyond five gallon batches. Additionally, you are extracting more of the sugars from some grains but not others in the bag, leaching more proteins out that later have to be removed. If / when you swish the bag around (which I have seen many a homebrewer do), your water temperature changes due to exposure to the air. When this happens the enzymes do not produce the sugar profile you are seeking. The enzymes on the crushed (not chopped) malted barley are very temperature sensitive with a range of +/- 2 degrees F between activating different enzymes. One of the results of this lack of temperature control is inconsistency from batch to batch. I have done that in the past and then experienced the differences from batch to batch on the same recipe. When you do things right, and with precision, you gain control of a complicated, multi-variable system.
I am not promoting that people shouldn't home brew, but only that there are ways to enhance the qualities of your brew. There is a step up in the the quality of your brewing process when you go all grain with a proper mash / sparge setup. Getting the mix of sugars that will ferment or non-ferment materially changes the flavor profile. Contrary to other all-grain home brewers, I tend to use more or completely specialty grains rather than simple sugaring grains (2 row or 6 row plain barley). It is more expensive, but I think one can taste the difference. It really isn't that difficult to buy / build a proper sparge set-up for 5-6 gallon batches. Most all the materials store inside the larger vessels. Admittedly, I tend to value high precision in most things. I am also largely a neander in woodworking and I think that extends to brewing. Making alcohol is easy, making "beer" is somewhat hard, making good beer is hard, and making consistent good beer is harder still. But it ultimately is the goal. I offer my advice freely. No one has to take it.
As to the kits, having watched them being assembled at various places, I'll stand by my opinion.