I went into a local BYO place today because I was told that I might be able to order grain from them. Turns out they were very willing to order grain for me from their supplier when they order LME and specialty grains so that was positive. Gotta wait a bit but at least I will get 25kg bags of 2-row without the 2 hour drive I was doing before.
But, we got talking about beer, brewing etc and I was so sadly disappointed to see what they considered a "Recipe". Basically, every recipe they showed me was:
X lbs LME
X time 2 glucose.
Probably 1/3 LME and 2/3 corn sugar in all of their recipes. They also only used dry yeast and all of the beer was fermented at 68 degrees regardless of whether it was a lager or an ale. Just so sad.
I did see an interesting way to ferment though. They had 50L plastic barrels with holes cut in them and then a plastic bag put into the barrel. The beer was put in the bag and a twist-tie put on the bag. That's it. No fermentation lock or anything. 2 weeks in that, filtered and bottled for a week. and you have beer. Or what they called beer.