The Top Tier is an expensive piece of equipment. Like many Blichmann items. The stand itself is $500, each burner tier is $140, and a shelf tier is $60. My configuration came out to $840 using 2 burner tiers and 1 shelf tier. I saved my money from September to March, and finally had enough to get it, along with a few other things.
The set up took me about 8 hours. It's fairly easy to set up but can take a long time if you want to make changes. At first I had the stand set up with the 2 burners on the left side and the shelf on the right side. Then I thought that I didn't want one burner under another because it would be steaming for an hour up underneath the other burner. It's probably not a big deal but I didn't feel comfortable with it. I moved the HLT burner to the back. This took time because I had to reconfigure the legs on the burner and the gas manifold which had already been done. I was happy I reconfigured it.
So far I've done 2 brews on the TopTier. The first was a 10 gallon batch of an amber ale recipe I made up. Half it to be dry hopped and the other half as is. The second batch was a 5 gallon batch of stout. So far, I'm really pleased with it. It's a lot of fun to use and seems to make the brewday more efficient. I like how my therminator bolts right into the stand too. So far I've been using it just with gravity. The HLT burner is high, but definitely not un-manageable. My plan is to get a march pump so that I can move the burner down and make vorlaufing and transferring to the boil kettle faster and easier.
My only complaint about the TopTier is having to move it from the garage to the backyard. On the side of the garage is rocks, which makes moving it tough, I plan to either cement in the area or get air tires for the Top Tier.
Here are a bunch of pics:
