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.

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

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.

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.

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Aaaaand Midnight Brewing Co. blog is online.