Purchasing the right system?

This may be a dumb question, recently I purchased the deluxe glass carboy brewing kit and was hoping to eventually brew my own recipes and experiment. Do I need an all grain system to do so? Thank you!

Not a dumb question at all. You do not need to brew AG to create your own recipes. AG brewing provide quite a bit more control and flexibility, though.

In addition, malt extract has come a long way since I started. They have all different kinds now like maris otter and rye. You can essentially make any recipe now.

Thank you, I really appreciate the responses. I can officially go back to being crazy excited to start brewing!

I started out brewing all grain. I have never brewed extract so I don’t have any input on that but the all grain process is a blast so when you are ready jump in with both feet. You will have no regrets

Also worth noting, you don’t need to buy an all grain system to do all grain. Look at Denny’s cheap and easy cooler mash tun system.

Or BIAB(brew in a bag) which is great for brewing in smaller spaces or as a transition from extract to all grain to see if you like it. Welcome to the obsession. :cheers:

We went a sort of hybrid approach. After years of extract we got a drink cooler and BIAB with that. Our pot wasn’t really big enough and the sale price on the cooler was much better than buying a bigger pot.

I’ve been playing with my own recipes too. For extract, I had this self-imposed constraint that I wanted to use all the extract I bought. Since our host only sells 3.15 or 6 lb bottles, it can be a bit constraining to hit a target with just LME, so you have to figure out the best combinations of LME & DME which is a bit more abstract than just thinking about the grains themselves. When I went all-grain, I felt better about saving left overs (I buy unmilled grain) so going AG was very liberating to me in terms of experimenting with recipe writing. – that’s just my experience.