Brew in bag wasn't as popular and documented when I started. My system is all gravity and it uses two turkey fryer kits and an insulated beverage cooler. Most of the equipment did not come from brewing places...just Wally World or the hardware store. But I did get some silicone tubing (heat resistant) from eBay and valve hardware from Bargain Fittings.
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Nice set up. But just to be clear, I'm not actually doing "Brew in a Bag" (BIAB on the brewing forums), I'm doing a variant - "Mash in a Bag", or actually two bags, as I split everything from mash through boil, so I can do it in the kitchen with two pots and two burners. No propane burner required.
With BIAB, you need a very large pot, as it has to hold all your grain, and all your water.
With my Mash-in-a-Bag process, my grain goes in the bags with roughly half the water (the 'first runnings'), and I use two 3.5 gallon buckets for that (mash water heated in the two brew pots). These buckets are small enough to fit in my oven, which I pre-heat to 200 F and shut off, so the mash holds temperature well.
While the mash is taking place, I heat the remaining water (the 'sparge', or 'second runnings' water) in my two brew pots.
At the end of the mash time, I lift the grain bags out, let them drain a bit, and then 'dunk sparge' them in the brew pots. After I've stirred them well to rinse out the sugars, I remove the grain bag, and
then add the first runnings from the plastic bucket. I'll get another quart from the bags that have been set aside in a bucket, and add that a bit later. Then on to the boil, split across the two pots and two burners.
No propane and extra burner to deal with, which I like (my gas grill is plumbed for NG).
I might be able to do BIAB with those pots, didn't do the volume calculations yet, but then I'd have to worry about keeping them warm during the mash, and maybe scorching if I tried to heat them.
To each their own, lotsa ways to go about it, but Mash-in-a-Bag and split mash/sparge/boil suits me, and is really a minimal amount of equipment (if you can call plastic buckets scrounged from a local bakery 'equipment').
I also do "no-chill" so no investment in immersion or counter-flow chillers either, and nothing to clean. I'm a lazy brewer.
-ERD50
