I know you're taking the piss but anyone who thinks that needs a sharp knock on the head. You take grains and brew beer and use lateral thinking to make it happen according to your own time schedule. I'm pretty new to grain brewing but I never understood slamming other people's methods unless there's a genuine basis for why it won't work.
Obviously I'm referring to the naysayers rather than yourself.
There are several methods of all grain brewing and there may be more discovered or invented in the future. As long as they make good beer, with repeatable results, who really cares how it was done.
I've never done BIAB, but I believe it can make good beer. I also want to try it sometime this next year. And I want to experiment more with batch sparging, too. I learned all grain using the fly sparging technique, which might be more efficient than batch sparging, but the latter seems to be less of a fuss and quicker. BIAB looks like it can be more forgiving of a poor crush than the other two methods I've mentioned.
And the cube thing seems like a good idea. I have to find a useful, food-grade cube to try it out but I want to try it. I'm a little confused about how the hopping rate needs to change to compensate for the hops being in near-boiling water for a longer period, and how it affects aroma and flavor hops, but if it doesn't work well for some beer recipes, it might be useful in others. It would save a step in the process by adding a shorter step and make for convenience by breaking up the brew day a bit.
I've learned a lot from being open to new ideas, like the above, growing my own hops, improvising or making brewing equipment, etc.
I also don't look down on extract-only brewing, but almost every beer I've made used at least specialty grains with extract and it's turned out well. All-grain gives you some more options, though, and it's cheaper (but takes a lot longer).
Don
