Aloha, my name is Kawika and I'm from Hawaii, born and raised native Hawaiian. I found this forum from a link at the BIAB section of Homebrewtalk.com. I've been browsing for the past two days and was not planning on registering at first...but after some reading around here, I figured I'd really like to check out the BIAB-acus...so here I am!
I began home brewing in the 1990's as a young college student with my roommate. We used the Cooper's extract kits (back in those days, we did not have a local home brew shop, only a single liquor store in Honolulu sold the extract kits and associated supplies).
Anyhow, after I graduated from college and got married, I put all my brewing equipment away and hadn't touched it until 2 months ago (almost 18 years later!) when I and another buddy who also used to home brew in his youth decided to resume the hobby.
We've done 4 partial grain - Liquid Malt Extract batches so far, with a classic Irish Stout and IPA bottled and successfully taste-tested. We now have a local Porter recipe with toasted coconut and an Amarillo-hopped red ale clone recipe in secondaries and can't wait to try those out as well. So far so good.
We have been contemplating investing some money in the pricier kettles so we could step it up to All Grain brewing. I almost pulled the trigger on a couple of Bayou Classics on Amazon a couple of days ago...but luckily I decided to investigate the BIAB option first. The more threads I've read on this forum, the more I'm glad I didn't buy the kettles. Perhaps later, but I think I'm gonna give BIAB a real go as our first foray into All Grain.
I find it a bit amusing that I began homebrewing with an Aussie product (Cooper's extract kits) and now I'm here at an AU forum years later to research the progression to All Grain. I love AU and have visited twice. I've been to Sydney and Tasmania in '06 and '08. I found most Aussies to be far more hospitable and friendly than many other places in the world that I have been (my wife works for the airlines, so we've traveled pretty extensively in the last decade).
Anyhow, I would like to express my gratitude for ya'all and the knowledge and experience you've all posted up here in this forum, and I can't wait to try out the APA Amarillo mini-BIAB recipe (Amarillo is my fav hop, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover it is the focus of this forum's mini-BIAB guide thread!)
Mahalo!
