Compact brewery build or Grain Father?

[badgerdan]

What's everyone's opinion on building a compact brewery like the grain father vs buying one?

Over here there's a company that makes one like the grain father but it's around £100 cheaper and to me seems a bit better, it's second gen too so is much improved.

I can also get a crab cooker in different sizes so I'm thinking, I could get a bigger size brewery and also choose all the parts to my desire ie the same as the blichmann parts like the ball valve and temp sensor. Plus I can have the switches on the wall away from the boiler.
only thing I don't like is the centre pot has large holes all around so will have to use a grain bag and can't think of how I can make a proper grain pot with mesh filter. ( I'd need to find a pot the same or similar size too)

Has anyone else built a compact brewery before?

[bryanferry]

Ive been waiting on the grain father price to decide between buying or building. I have a electric keggle that I use for biab and was looking to upgrade it to more like a gain father style system. The trade off seems to be a fixed capacity that will do the job over putting together your own version that you can improve and expand on (plus the option for distilling in the grain father was interesting...).

I did consider that last year the kickstarter for the Brewbot was pitching a core system with all the pumps, flow controllers and computer connections. that might be a way to go that would allow changing the vessel size and keeping all the controls uniform. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ca ... -appliance Sadly they dont seem to have released any products yet.

would love to know about the version thats £100 cheaper?

[badgerdan]

Here's a link to the Bratberger
http://nettbutikk.brygging.no/produkter ... ager-igjen

But I've just noticed the Grain Father's price on the NZ site is £480 ($995) and that includes pump and chiller where as the Bratsberger is £338 (kr3690) but that's without chiller and pump, or £444 (kr4850) with both so after all that it's maybe not that much cheaper. However for me i can just pick one up where as the grain father would incur postage and import charges

[badgerdan]

Actually I've just found out the Grain Father is being sold for £595 in the UK so the Bratsberg for me is much cheaper (but distilling isn't an option on that one)

[bryanferry]

Cheers for the link, used Microsoft translator to read the webpage and one of the features was translated as 'More powerful gods in the brew kettle'.

Now that is a selling feature!

[badgerdan]

Haha, fantastic