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renew,
Outstanding! 23 years of damn fine beer. You are the man!
My buddy and I just started doing partial mashes. (We've been brewing with extracts for 5 years.) While I definitely agree that one can make an excellent beer with extract alone, and an even better one with extract with a short grain steep (say, put bagged, cracked grains in cold, bring to 160, yank the grains and discard), the fine control one can get by using a mash for any significant portion of the gravity makes a streamlined mashing procedure worthwhile for some things. Munich Dunkel, f'rinstance, just doesn't work right unless you use at least some portion of Munich malt. Of course, the other thing about that one is that the authentic way to do it is with a triple decoction and the attendant caramelization, but you can get the same effect just by doing your boil on an electric stove.
I hear you, though. Our mash procedure has been single or double infusion, then pour through a sparge bag in a big colander over the brew kettle, then sparge with a couple gallons using ladles to slowly pour the sparge water over the grain. Takes half an hour to get two gallons of wort (to which we add extract to make up half or more of the gravity.) It's about a 60 or 65% efficiency.
We are going to try and do one all-grain batch in April or so, but, by and large, it seems to be too big a pain in the ass to bother with.
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