False Bottom?

As you read last week we ordered a false bottom so I thought it was time to make a post talking about our trial run with the new piece of equipment. So without further ado if you would take a look at the picture below you will see.... a shoe.... in a box. Clearly this is not a false bottom, unless you count how the sole of my shoe is falling off. Needless to say the false bottom has yet to show up leaving us brewless for the moment. Fear not, though, for hopefully it will arrive within the week and by this weekend we will be in full gear to brew!

Stout v3.0 should be ready to drink soon as well! More on that later.

So I propose a toast! Raise your homebrews to the... shoe... in a box... Cheers!

UPDATE: Disaster!!! After writing this post I happened to check the ol' email and found a message buried in with the spam from Mountain Homebrew. It seems this particular false bottom is unavailable from the manufacturer until further notice! Of course that can mean only one thing. There will only be a shoe in a box, nothing more. We will be looking for another place to get the false bottom (or perhaps just make one).

Equipment Update

Welcome back fair readers! There are probably only two of you, but hey there could be hundreds right? Right. So here is the skinny. We held a top level meeting amongst the head brewers of Midnight Brewing Co and concluded that it was time to start investing in some more equipment. As such, I am here to describe to you the wonders of our initial purchases and a little about why we made them.

First is a false bottom for the mash/lauter tun (5 gallon Gatorade cooler). Up until now we have been using various braided hose from Home Depot normally reserved for home plumbing like connecting water from your copper pipes to your sink or toilet. This was fairly easy (good) and cheap (better), but it had its downsides as B Brewer touched on. The polymer braid was easily crushed by the grains and was essentially ineffective. I could get into the flow dynamics of why you want even draining of wort from the grain bed for best extraction and such but that’s above my head. Needless to say we were essentially drawing wort from just one small part of the whole grain bed which is inefficient. The stainless steel braid fared somewhat better but was clogged in our Stout 3.0 brew. And so that brings us to False Bottoms.

Fortunately for all of us a genius of an entrepreneur out there came up with a solution to our problem. A pre-made false bottom that you can buy in various sizes so that it fits your particular cooler (read: mash/lauter tun). We bought ours from Mountain Homebrew. I have not run into anyone else that is using this particular false bottom so I am not sure what to expect as far as efficiency. Only one way to find out!

Next is our new 20BBL fermenter. Here you can see B brewer installing this beut on the premises. Originally listed at $6,500 we talked the guys over at North American Brewing Services down to a cool $6,000 even... Okay so that's not really B brewer and we didn't buy this fermenter but wouldn't that have made for a great blog post?

Alright, so we haven't bought anything else quite yet. We are thinking of trying to improve our immersion wort chiller to decrease the amount of time we spend cooling the wort which sits now at 30-45 minutes. We originally used 1/4" copper tubing and only about 20 feet of it too which when coiled up does not amount to much vertically. In essence the coils collect on the bottom of the kettle and since the last time I checked hot things rise and cool things sink (go science!) we end up having nice chilled wort at the bottom of the kettle but the top remains scaldingly hot for quite some time.

Two things we can do. #1 More cowbell! Basically just get some more tubing and make the whole thing longer while at the same time weaving some heavy duty copper wire between the coils so that it will stand up and not collapse on itself. #2 Switch to a larger diameter tubing. Larger diameter tubing means that there will be more surface area of the coil in contact with the hot wort and as such more heat transfer.

Both methods can be only carried so far. Problem #1 At a certain point in a long tube the cooling water will have reached the same temperature as the hot wort and so any further length of tubing that hot water has to travel is simply a waste of time/tubing/money(the worst of the three).
Problem #2 You can get a tube that is too large so that the heat transfer through the copper pipe is only to the outer diameter of the column of cooling water. Again, inefficient and a waste of resources/money (there's the M word again).

We are going to go with method #1 and invest in some more copper tubing and construct it so the height of the coils is relatively equal to the height of our normal ending boil volume. Notes later on how much we improve.

To end... I really don't have any more words for you intrepid brewers so stop reading my mindless, meandering, message and get yourself a homebrew. Cheers!

3.0 update

An update on 3.0

A few days have passed and we've started getting anxious about contamination in our brew since there was no visible action on the airlock. While this was probably due to the seal being busted on the airlock we wanted to be certain. In which case we decided it would be a good idea to transfer the brew to a glass carboy. Why this makes sense I am not sure, since if the beer was going to be contaminated it probably would have been already. When I peeled off the top of the fermenter I was greeted with the delicious smells of chocolate and coffee. It was like I was opening up 5 gallons of some crazy chocolate milkshake.

Transferring the beer in a 3rd person narrative:

B Brewer, alone one afternoon took this task upon himself and transfered the fermenting beer to the 5 gallon glass carboy. Shortly after he noticed a a nice frothy head forming at the very small airspace. "Hmmmm this looks like it could be bad" he proclaimed loudly to himself while stroking his chin. Surely enough the froth head reached the airlock and showed no signs of slowing down, it was not happy about being disturbed from its nice and quiet plastic fermenter. B Brewer acted quickly, dashing into his supply closet of random brewing accessories and grabbed a discarded piece of tubing. A Perfect fit onto the airlock, now what do to do with this 5 gallons of frothing beer? Time was running out as the train of bubbles was quickly reaching the end of the newly minted blow off hose. Frantically B Brewer threw off all of items from the bathroom counter and onto his bed. And placed the carboy of angry liquid on the bathroom sink counter and taped down the blow off hose into the drain. After a few hours B Brewer decided that this plan was no good, do to the large volume of delicious smelling froth being lost down the drain. Alas the beer was tamed and transfered back to its preferred home. But not before B Brewer could document this phenomena.

Stout 3.0

After a long period of mourning, and a proper send off for our IPA we returned to our equipment with a new resolve.

What better to replace our lost IPA than a nice dark stout, just in time for Spring! Everyone loves dark beer on a warm day!

Here at Midnight brewing we have a tendency to be a little off with the dates and brewing schedules. About the only beer that we timed correctly was our Pumpkin Ale. Our Belgian was in the late fall, Our Holiday ale was brewed mid December...

But lets get to the 3.0,

Due to requests from a certain connoisseur of our stout, we decided to up the roasted barley and chocolate malts in this version. Version 2.0 was good after sufficient lagering, but was lacking the complex flavors that we achieved from version 1.0 which was an extract brew.

And another installment of Lessons learned:

All started off well, we struck early and even got the mash off to a good start. Until the dreaded stuck run off. We have been referring to stout since our first all grain batch as "the cursed beer". You may say "Oh dark beer, no problems there". Sure, its forgiving in the flavor department, but since we moved to all grain we have had no luck with our lautering and stout. See Stout 2.0

A little history of our mash tun; we set out to design a mash tun that resembled "El Cheapo Mash Tun"
Short Story: We bought the wrong kind of braid, the plastic polymer kind, not the stainless steel. We thought it might have been a little too easy to cut (ok so our trips to the hardware store aren't always that fruitful or relaxing).

Anyways, my cousin a veteran homebrewer gave me a piece of the stainless steel braid at Easter that he used in his mash tun. Awesome right? I agree. Multiple homebrewers in the same family!

But the awesomeness ends there as we decided that we wanted a quick brew session and that we should wait to modify the mash tun until after this brew...

Well after 5 or so mashes, the polymer braid that we had been using was completely crushed, which left us with a runoff worse than an old man with an enlarged prostate.

A few of the solutions that we tried:

Blowing up the hose: Not recommended, can easily burst blood vessels and blow who knows what into your delicious mash. Succeeded in getting the flow to pick up briefly, but quickly stopped again. A Brewer laughed hysterically at this one as I must of looked like I was doing some kind of crazy imitation of Dizzy Gillespie

Remove braid and hope for best: Not recommended either, results in large volume of wort everywhere and a slight "deck" taste to your finished beer.

Ultimately we poured the mash into our fermenter temporarily and installed the new braid. Which of course worked perfectly.

Lesson learned: If you got an equipment upgrade, use it right away.

Brew School?

Thought about getting a professional education in commercial brewing? I found this blog of a brewer attending the program offered by Versuchs- und Lehranstalt für Brauerei in Berlin (VLB). I haven't read much of it myself but the gist of it is that he is a brewer that is blogging from Berlin about the program and his experiences there. Worth checking out if it's something you have thought about doing yourself.

Midnight's First (But Not Last) IPA

Well faithful readers (all two of you) it has been awhile and for that we apologize. But the wait is over and a new post is come. I bring you a tale. A tale filled with adventure, mystery, intrigue and disaster. Okay maybe not the first three so much as that last one but hey if it reels you in, it reels you in.

So several weeks ago, back in ye olden times of February, we set out to brew the IPA I prattled on about. It was going to be marvelous. As expected the local brew shop did NOT have a good selection of hops AND they had jacked up the price. Well not to be put of we forged ahead and chose an assortment of hops, some of which we had never worked with before, much less heard of. Let me lay it out for you:

Base malt of 2-row barley (naturally)

Vienna malt

Cara-pils to add a little body

As for the hops this is where it gets wild and crazy:

Mt Hood pellets 4.2% AA

Chinook pellets 11.2% AA

UK Phoenix pellets 10% AA

Saaz whole leaf 2.5% AA

Kent Goldings whole leaf 5% AA

SG:1.056 (corrected)

The SG was somewhat higher than anticipated. Normally we do not have the best efficiency in the world and so overload on the grain a bit. Apparently our efficiency has improved. In any case by the end of the boil our brewery (read: the back deck) smelled overwhelmingly hoppy. We were on the right track to IPAdome.

Now this is where the "adventure" begins. It turns out that a member of the Midnight Brewing team who shall remain unnamed (not me) neglected to bring the sink adapter for our wort chiller. Normally not such a big deal but we were on a tight schedule. Places to be, beers to drink, the usual. So instead of the usual cooling of the wort and pitching of the yeast we decided to risk letting it cool on its own in the fermenter and ask our kind and gracious... brewery landlord/adjunct-assistant-junior-brewer-in-training/Allison pitch the yeast in the morning.

At this point I bet you are thinking: "Where's the adventure? Your fermenter will be sealed even if it cools slowly it should be at least somewhat aseptic. Sounds more like a tale of laziness than intrigue." Fear not fair reader for there is still more. So not only was the yeast going to be pitched in the morning but we noticed that the gasket on our fermenter lid that the airlock passes through was torn. So there was a small, ever so small opening through which potentially contaminating wild yeast and bacteria could move and get at our cooling wort. But hey, we are adventurous so why not forge ahead. It gets better. The yeast we were going to use (from Wyeast Laboratories in one of those convenient smack to activate pouches) had been activated say... a month ago... or two... give or take a month.

So there you have it... adventure and definitely mystery. Would this actually work? Shall I skip ahead? Well the short answer is no. Of course not. This is a tale of mystery, intrigue and disaster. So a week and a half later we set about bottling. The bottles had all been cleaned and sanitized, labels were removed (Thank you brillo pad) and caps were ready. First we made the transfer from our fermenter to our bottling bucket. That's when you could smell the first hints of disaster. Something was off. It smelled hoppy but only a little bit. It seemed more muted than it should have been. There was something else there covering it up like that layer of dust that covers our brewing books on how not to screw up a brew. Not only that but it was far cloudier than it should have been. So we decided to have a little taste before bottling just to be sure all was well with Midnight Brewing Co's first IPA.

Normally this is where I would go on and on about how good it tastes. No. No, not this time. Tell me, have you ever licked the wall of a basement? Or maybe just chewed on some wet cardboard. Perhaps both in one sitting? If not then you can't quite fully understand the flavors we were getting. It was heinous. I mean it was bad. Not only that but the taste didn't really seem to want to go away. No, no it would rather chill on your taste buds letting you enjoy the rankness for as loooong as possible. I will have nightmares about this one. So long story short it was a tragedy. The whole batch went down... the... drain. Tears ensued, albeit manly ones. The Midnight Brewing flag was lowered to half staff.

The first Midnight IPA has joined the ranks of such brews as the Raspberry Wheat and the Scotch Ale. Though I think this one definitely tops the list of Midnight's catastrophic brews since it was utterly undrinkable by anyone (for some bizarre reason that totally escapes us there are some people out there who love the raspberry wheat AND the Scotch Ale).

Lessons learned: Don't cut corners. Do what must be done. There is nothing like investing so much time into a brew and watching it swirl down the drain like so much Budweiser. We are going to repair the fermenter gasket and someone is going to pin a note to their chest from now on reminding them not to forget the sink adapter. Oh and I will remember to buy fresh yeast this time (yeah that was my bad).

Until next time readers, grab a homebrew and raise it in silence as testament to this failure.

Conversion to all-grain

Back in September Midnight Brewing took the plunge and converted to all-grain. Behold the trials and tribulations of rapid brewery expansion!