In this episode, we discuss brewing your best beers with a limited amount of space and gear. Maybe you live in an apartment and can’t use a burner on your deck. Or maybe you have no space for a temp controlled space, but want to make better beers. Maybe you have a full house and garage with no place for beer or gear, but you really want to brew more often. Maybe you just want a variety of beer styles AND the ability to store them. We hear about problems like that all the time from folks coming in the shop. And there’s almost always a way to get what you want.

In this episode, we have a conversation with Casey Binkley, one of the co-founders of the FastBrewing company out of Toronto, Ontario. They are the makers of the very popular FastRack, FastFerment, and FastLabel products. All of which are actually made in Michigan! The FastBrewing products are a straightforward series of homebrewing tools that are aimed at giving you the most use, while taking up the least amount of space---all at an affordable cost. They tend to grab interest when people see them and often move quickly off our shelves because they actually live up to their name. Not to mention the company continues to listen to their audience and improve and expand upon their offerings. Plus, after meeting the FastBrewing crew, we can easily say that they’re a great bunch of people to grab a drink with, as long as you aren’t in Tijuana.

In this episode, we discuss our favorite new shop toy, The Grainfather, an electric all-in-one all-grain system. It allows you to mash, recirculate, mash-out, sparge, boil, and chill your wort, all in one 5 to 6 gallon system. Several of us have had a chance to try out the Grainfather at home and we’ve been using it regularly at the shop to brew test batches and kit samples. Plus, it’s also being used for experimental batches at local breweries AND we have a growing number of customers who have bought one for themselves after seeing it in action. For this episode, we invited one of those customers--Eric Tomme--into the studio to lend a hand in discussing the details and the pros and cons of the system.

In this episode, we have John Bergher the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Store It Cold, LLC in the studio with us to discuss the innovative temperature controller they created. It’s called the CoolBot and it uses a simple window unit type of air conditioner to help you create your own walk-in cooler out of just about any insulated room. We recently received the CoolBot in store and wanted John to come and tell us about the device, its inspiration, and some of the many uses people have found for it.