If you had £1500 to spend, what kit would you buy?

[Slid]

Is space unlimited (i.e. is this hypothetical or is the spare bedroom out of bounds?).

Is this �£1500 for a new hobby from scratch or an experienced brewer who can shop 2nd hand and build things?

If it were me, I'd keep my current plastic 3-tier system (cost ~�£200 to build)

Add in a couple of conical's and a couple of s.h larger fridges for them (�£180 conicals, �£100 parts, materials and an old fridges). ~�£280

Keezer,(�£40 freezer, 6x �£30 taps, 6x �£30 kegs, �£100 ancillaries and fittings, �£30 CO2, �£50 Coke-cola gas board off ebay) ~�£550

Yeast handling kit, a workbench with sneeze guard, fridge, diy stir plates, etc. Mostly because good yeast is I think the one thing my current setup is lacking. If I want to brew an AIPA I'm practically limited to Safael US-05, because it's �£2 and makes nice beer. Doing a split batch with 3 similar yeasts then becomes expensive as other yeasts are liquid and �£7 each.

Hi Spoon

When your fancy yeast has done its thing. just swirl it around in the primary FV with a bit of left over beer and bung it into some 250ml PET bottles that previously held lemonade or such-like. If you leave these in the fridge, they keep for months. That spreads out the cost over many brews and I am guessing that any brewery or regular HB'er would do this.

 

[Spoon]

Hi Spoon

When your fancy yeast has done its thing. just swirl it around in the primary FV with a bit of left over beer and bung it into some 250ml PET bottles that previously held lemonade or such-like. If you leave these in the fridge, they keep for months. That spreads out the cost over many brews and I am guessing that any brewery or regular HB'er would do this.

Not so much the inability to harvest yeast from current brews, but it'd be nice to be able to split batches, I'm unlikely to want to use the same yeast more than once in succession, i.e. I might want to try making a bitter with Nottingham, Windsor, Shepherd Neame 1698, and Timothy Taylors yeasts, but after that not want to brew bitters again for 6 months.

A load of stir plates, flasks, bottled ClO2, microscope, etc would allow that either cultured from bottles, or just yeast kept on slants for 6 months. Then next month 4x different Belgian yeasts, or lagers, wheatbeers etc. It's a slightly different problem than the example of just harvesting the same from each beer and re-using it (like a commercial brewer).

I guess my point is that I don't see the value in spending £7 on yeast, because I won't know if the resultant beer is any better than it would have been with £2 yeast, but having both side by side would be more useful.

I've got a laboratory background, so it's a mix of work and fun anyway!