Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Monday, December 24, 2007

Why Blog?

So as I sit here on my flight to Atlanta (Cheers Monday Night Brewing!) I have been pondering the whole purpose of this blog. Why do we do it? This has come up in conversation amongst the brewing staff (all two of us, staff meeting are always hectic). My first thought was that I blog because I want to share what we are doing with everyone else. But let’s face it, for all the writing that goes up on this blog there are not millions of fans flocking to the site. I think then our purpose is primarily entertainment of sorts with a bit of education thrown into the mix.

Most people that would read this blog can be divided into two groups. One group is made up of the people that are just starting to get into homebrewing themselves and they are looking for more information on how it’s done. This is what I did and I imagine it’s what many people do. The internet is such a wonderful resource, making the details of homebrewing much more accessible to everyone. Case in point, we got a hit on the blog from someone who was searching Google using the terms “brew kettle” and “garbage can.” Now I don’t know if this is good or bad but apparently Google thinks highly of us when you search for homebrewing and garbage…. Seriously. I think it’s because I described garbage in the kitchen in one post. I certainly don’t think our beer is garbage, with the exception of the raspberry wheat. Now to you, the intrepid up and coming homebrewer out there trying to turn a garbage can into a brew kettle let me say this, don’t. Please. That’s just gross. Sure you may buy it new (thus hopefully relatively clean) and you are saving money on a better brew pot but seriously, why? Invest a little more money in some quality and in the long term it pays off. I would suggest the turkey fryer readily available from Home Depot.

The second group of people reading this I see as fellow brewers. I read several other blogs myself. It’s a great way to learn more about techniques other brewers are using but learning aside I think it’s just fun. I enjoy reading about the trials and tribulations of the Monday Night Brewers and Beaux’s. I don’t really know how I could put it any better.

That first group of people, the learners, raises another interesting point. Recipes. When we were first starting out brewing with our almost exclusively extract based brew how did we find a recipe? On the web of course. There are many, many sites out there with recipes for all different styles of beers. As it was those recipes posted online that got us our start should we in turn post our recipes? On the one hand it is nice to call a brew your own, a unique beer that only you know how to make. I would call this the “real brewery” perspective in the sense that it is the actual breweries that consider their recipes to be proprietary. On the other hand without the freely available information online we would have had a much more difficult time learning the process of brewing and eventually coming to a point where we could formulate our own recipes. This spirit of sharing information is true of most hobbyists and homebrewers are no exception. So what should we do?

On this question B brewer raised another good point. Although it would be nice to share our brew recipes with others, what happens when someone takes a recipe that we have not really perfected (I bring you back to the train wreck of a disaster that is known as the Midnight Brewing Raspberry Wheat), brews it and then discovers they have wasted their time brewing something that tastes like a mix of under ripe raspberries and windex? Clearly that reader would never come back to us for information or advice.

So I am back where I started on this question. Post recipes or not? We’ll decide in the next staff meeting.

Christmas is coming, have you gotten dad a gift yet? Perhaps you should consider an intro homebrewing kit! Cheers and don’t forget to drink a homebrew now as a reward for slogging through more of my meandering thoughts!

Bottling the Spiced Christmas Ale (Finally!)

So it has been some time since either of us made a post to the blog. Apologies all around but B Brewer has had finals and vacation time and A Brewer… Well I really have no excuse other than rampant laziness as of late.

In any case, we bottled the Christmas Spiced Ale/Holiday Spiced Ale last weekend (Dec 15th). Now if you are reading this blog reverently, which I imagine you are, then you would most likely notice that that was almost a month after we brewed the beer to begin with. If you are a brewer yourself you are probably thinking something like “Ah they must have been racking every week or so and just letting the beer condition in fresh new carboys to enhance all the flavors.” Or if you are not a brewer you might be thinking “I have no idea what this guy is talking about, he sounds lazy to me, and I just like reading bout beer.” Okay well truth be told the non-brewer is closer to the truth. We just never got around to racking. No, no, not even once. The beer sat on the lees for almost a whole month! Well nothing to be done about it now and in some cases beer is intentionally left on the les for extended periods of time. I would leave you with an example of such a brew from teh interwebs but I am actually on a plane right now flying home to Redmond, Washington so that’s out of the question.

So we bottled. And as always we took some hydrometer readings and through some complex calculations we determined that we had a potential alcohol of about 8%. This is what I was aiming for so I was very satisfied. If you read the post about when we brewed our goals were twofold for a seasonal winter holiday beer: Higher alcohol content than your standard ales, and a complex spiciness. More on both of these with the tasting notes later. We got slightly more than two cases worth of your standard beer bottles with 53 bottles. Oh and on the note of bottles, I can tell you that Saranac labels are still the bane of our bottling lives. I have never found a label more unwilling to come off of a bottle… ever. We use the most abrasive scrubbing pads we can find and after much scouring we can get the paper of the label off but are left with this gummy sticky residue from the glue that, try as we might, goes nowhere. (I try to give all those to either B brewer or someone else…)

Alright so bottling was finished, the caps were marked with a C for Spiced Christmas ale or something along those lines and the kitchen was cleaned. As usual we dumped the muck left on the bottom of the fermenter outside in the snow. So usually I have very little patience and I end up opening a bottle 4 to 5 days after bottling. I know, I know, its not enough time to let some of the more bitter flavors settle down and get that complexity that ends up shining through but I can’t help it. When you put so much blood, sweat and tears into a brew (where do you think the “complexity of flavor” comes from? Kidding) you can’t help but want to reap the fruits of your labor.

So I opened up a chilled bottle last night and poured myself a glass. The aroma was absolutely amazing. All of the spices were there. It was like no beer I had ever smelled and the color was dark on the level of a porter. Tasting. Delicious. I know I say that every time but it’s true. You can definitely get the flavor that you would expect from a darker beer with hints of maltiness and it was slightly thick, along the lines of skim milk. Thicker than water, lighter than cream. The cacophony of spices is amazing. I can’t say that I could pick out any one spice that really dominated over the rest. They all blended together into a symphony of flavor. The taste lived up to all of the expectations I had built up from the aroma. Then there is the alcohol content. I have definitely had beers that have high alcohol content that dominates the beer, something that to me is undesirable. It’s the whole idea of say painting a picture and using only one color. Sure you get yourself a painting but it isn’t particularly involved or exciting. So at 8% our beer is strong enough that it gives you a warm feeling as it goes down your throat, as it should for a winter beer, but it is not so strong that it overwhelms any of the other flavors and complexities. In a word, balance.

So there you have it. Those are my impressions of our first attempt at a spiced beer using a recipe exclusively of our own formulation. Perhaps B brewer will be by later to leave his thoughts. In any case now that you have slogged through my meandering thoughts you are likely parched. So go to the fridge and get yourself a homebrew!

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Branding pt 1

So with some downtime we are trying to refine what we want the "look" of the brewery to be. What we want is to develop not just an image we can slap on some glasses but an overall theme that will be tie together all of the logos, bottle labels, tap handles and the format of the blog. I guess we are trying to develop some of the brand of the brewery.

The brand of the brewery encompasses not only the physical aspects such as the iconography I mentioned above but also the more conceptual aspects of what your brewery represents. That is, from a conceptual standpoint, what ideas and feelings do you want your consumers to associate with your brewery and your products. When I think of a microbrewery, (or in our case maybe nano-brewery...) I am already thinking that it is different from the major brands like Anheuser-Busch. It's the "little guy." By drinking their beer I am saying that I am different than the Joe six packs of America who probably won't ever pick up anything but a Bud. Picking up from that easy branding start, we need to develop further to identify ourselves in the growing sea of small breweries. What sets us apart making us different and memorable to the consumer? Are we the quirky brewery like Magic Hat? Are we the traditional Belgian style brewery like Ommegang (a personal favorite of mine)?

To be honest I really have little to no idea what I am talking about (does it show?) but these are my amateur impressions of branding from what reading I have done and what I think of when I ponder the subject. I think a good example of a developing brand can be seen in the guys over at Monday Night Brewery. We don't even have names for our beers much less labels like these guys do. They are doing what we at Midnight Brewing can only dream of doing and taking forward their ambitions of becoming a brewery serving up delicious beer to all. In any case, more thoughts on the subject of branding and maybe a taste of what we come up with to come later.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING to all! Be sure to crack open some homebrew with the turkey and mashed potatoes.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

B Brewers take on Holiday Ale

To fill in the blanks of A Brewers memory, the mystery spice was ground cloves. Which, I hope we removed most of when we strained the chilled wort....

Now my formulation of this recipe was based on some experimentation with brewing a spiced tea(which I read was a recommended/necessary step in designing a spice formulation) Going into this with a confident attitude I thought that the Cardamom would give the strongest flavor and might overpower all the other flavors...being a fan of Chai, I though eh what the heck, it will probably be tolerable...so I added quite a bit of cardamom and an equal amount of cloves, cinnamon and a little all spice for good measure. Boy did I ever learn about cloves. You really come to know a spice when it invades everything you eat for the next day...

Needless to say I was careful with the amount of cloves in the "secret" spice formula :-)

Every time we brew I feel like we learn something new.

Lessons learned this time:

1) The hose carrying the wort out of the mash/lauter tun should be properly secured, if it does not stay in the collecting container, "Hey quick question..." is not an acceptable response to seeing delicious wort emptying out on the deck.

2) Throwing hops into boiling wort on high heat = massive boil over and recipe modification.

3) If you are filling up the fermenter with sanitizing solution with the water exiting the wort chiller, you should not leave the room.


A 48 hour update: Vigorous activity on the airlock

Monday, November 19, 2007

Brewing the Spiced Christmas Ale

Yesterday was brew day for our spiced Christmas ale. Just like every other beer of ours we don't really have a name for it other than the descriptor of what type of beer it is. Suggestions anyone? (Does anyone really read this?) This was B Brewer's recipe and was based on the very first beer we ever brewed, a fitting tribute as it was this time one year ago that we first started brewing. That first beer was a Red Ale (also nameless) that I wasn't really too fond of until about a month after it had been bottled. This was the first homebrewing lesson in patience though personally I still haven't taken it to heart.

Originally the Red Ale was a mixture of extract and grain, with a complete mess of the kitchen made in what could maybe be described as a mash using a grain bag. Oh the memories. It was then that we used a rolling pin and a cutting board to try to crush our meager few pounds of grain for the mash. In fact the background of the banner is from that attempt. Do you have any idea how long it takes to crush even a few pounds of barley with such a setup? Think hours. Grueling grueling hours. That was the experience that made us invest in a grain grinder (The Barley Crusher which I swear by) which has saved countless hours of frustration, especially when we transitioned to all grain several beers down the road.

In any case, the base malt for this batch was 2 row pale malt combined with roasted barley, and dark crystal malt (I think, I don't have the recipe in front of me) for the specialty grains. We also held some dry malt extract (DME) in reserve for the boil in order to really bring up the potential alcohol. Of course a spiced ale is nothing without spices. We used a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, orange peel, cardamom and something else that I just can't quite remember (will update later). For hops we used Northern Brewer (pellet), Cascade (whole) and Willamette (pellet). Originally Willamette wasn't going to be in there but apparently we were overdue for a boilover because as soon as I added the first Northern Brewer our kettle immediately frothed furiously and boiled all over the deck taking a lot of the hops with it. Some could say this was an amateur mistake and I should have paid closer attention as the person adding the hops but I would rather say shouldn't someone have been watching me watch the boil... So the Willamette hops were added to account for this act of god that removed our other hops from the boil and we moved on. Since the goal was to get not just the flavor of the spices but also that powerful aroma, and what an aroma it was, half of the spices were added at 15 minutes to the end of the boil and the rest were added at 5 minutes.

Cooling took us about an hour with the wort chiller running. I think we can get better cooling if we can keep the coils from bunching up in the kettle. At the moment even if we spread out the coils before immersing them in the kettle, in the end they all end up settling in a bunch at the bottom. We are going to try using some heavy duty copper wire to weave in and out of the coils vertically to try and keep them spread out more. With all of the coils bunched at the bottom a half hour of running cold water through cools the bottom of the kettle so it is safe to touch but the middle and top are still too hot.

We took a reading just before pitching our yeast and the result was a SG of 1.092. Too high you say? Well lets hope it ends up at that high holiday beer level that warms you up but not so high that you can't taste the spices. Going to take a reading next weekend and then rack it and let it sit for another week or so. So check back later but in the meantime you too should be drinking a homebrew.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Tasting the Belgian

So last night was the moment of truth. I couldn't wait any longer so I threw two bottles of the Belgian into the fridge. Granted it had only been four days since bottling, far too short a time to get a good idea of the quality of the beer, but I was impatient to see some results from our new recipe. There wasn't much head from the beer, whether that was because our fridge was too cold or just because it had only been carbonating for four days I have no idea. It was a bit on the dark side for a Belgian, closer to the color of a pale ale. Holding it up to the light it was extremely cloudy, a sure sign of a thick beer. Perhaps adding oats wasn't the best idea... In any case it tasted delicious. There was the classic underpinnings of the coriander with a slightly acidic tartness. I could definitely taste the orange AND that bitter orange peel flavor that was there when we bottled had gone away. In a word, Delicious (If I had any command of the english language I would put another word there so I stop describing it as delicious but I don't and I am too lazy to pick up a thesaurus). To get an unbiased opinion I gave a sample to my neighbor (lover of keystone... perhaps not so unbiased) and she called it a mouthful so perhaps in the future less oats (only used a half pound).
Anyway my kitchen is now stacked with cases of homebrew adding to the rich atmosphere of unwashed dishes and overflowing garbage can. The roomates are starting to get restless with the abundance of beer in the corner but hey, relax, have a homebrew.

Wednesday, November 7, 2007