Off to Brew School

I have good news and bad news fair readers. Bad news first? Well there may be a slow down in the blog postings. Whats that you say? We take forever to post anything new anyway? Well I wouldn't say forever, but it looks like things might slow down a bit more, which brings us to the good news. I am going to be heading off to Germany to attend the 2009 Brewmaster program at Versuchs- und Lehranstalt für Brauerei in Berlin (VLB).

The course is going to start January 5th 2009, but we may not be able to do much brewing between now and then since I am going to be focusing on packing up my life in Rochester (And if we did brew would there be enough time for me to enjoy any of it?).

I hope to do two things for you readers though. #1 Discuss why I chose to go to VLB over other programs such as the one at UC Davis or the World Brewing Academy through the Siebel Institute of Technology. #2 Start a blog about my experience in the program should anyone want to read about it.

In any case that's whats to come for Midnight Brewing Co. That was probably as tiring reading as it was writing so why don't you crack open a homebrew. Cheers!

Tasting the Pumpkin

Back for your reading pleasure are some tasting notes on the pumpkin ale. It’s been three weeks since we bottled the beer and I have cracked open several in just the past week. The beer is a dark amber color about 14 Lovibond. It has enough cloudiness to it that you can’t see completely through it but it is not so cloudy as a unfiltered wheat.

The body is not exactly what I had hoped. Granted the idea is to avoid getting a beer with the thickness of pumpkin pie but at the same time a beer of this style should have more body to it than water which is what we ended up with. Had we not had so many problems with the mash as you may have read in the last post, I am sure the body would have been thicker and more on target.

The flavor is pretty much what we were shooting for. Remember, the idea is to get most of your flavors from the spices you add, not necessarily from the pumpkin itself. After all, have you ever eaten plain pumpkin before it gets made into pie? It’s not a bad flavor but it is not what is going to make your beer stand out. We ended up with a subtle blend of spices so you can definitely get the impression of pumpkin pie but it is not as strong as actual pie. Why is this good? Well you want to be able to drink more than one of these in a sitting and if the spice come off as too strong I would be more likely to drink just one before switching to a lighter brew.

This all comes together to an excellent beer for the fall and on into Halloween. If you haven’t tried making one in time for this Halloween nothing says you can’t just make one now especially as there are plenty of real pumpkins to be found. If you do want to make a pumpkin ale of your own, be sure to read our other posts here about our experience making it to avoid some of the troubles we have had.

On that note, crack open a homebrew and enjoy the fall! Cheers!

Also, be sure to vote in the upcoming election and once you do, open up another homebrew as a reward for being a good citizen!

On Pumpkin Ale and Stuck Sparge

Here begins the next part of the Pumpkin Ale saga. So we brewed last weekend (read: I wrote this post three weeks ago and didn't finish it till now) and it went… as it normally does with screw ups and hang-ups. Here is a brief summary of the ingredients (sans hops which I can't find the list of right now):

5lbs canned pumpkin (roasted 1hr on a baking sheet)
lager malt
Crystal malt
Ginger
Cinnamon
Allspice

We use lager malt because the pumpkin is going to add a lot of body to the beer and had we used our regular base malt of 2-row barley it could have resulted in an overly thick beer. The idea is to get some of the flavors of pumpkin pie not to make it as thick as pumpkin pie. As for the spices I will leave that up to your own personal taste. This is the blend we used last time and it turned out well. Other brewers will leave out the ginger or will add spices like cardamom, but again it’s personal taste.

The hop choice comes mainly out of availability. This is a completely different hop blend than we used last time but our LHBS was out of every variety of hops we used previously with the exception of Willamette.

We roasted the pumpkin for one hour in the oven on a baking sheet. After roasting we added the pumpkin to the mash after 30 minutes. It smelled delicious.

The mash went well until it came time for lautering and sparging. Our mash tun setup consists of a metal braid in the bottom of our converted cooler which can lead to some issues. I am talking issues like the kind an old man with an enlarged prostate gets. Weak stream. On the lighter beers such as pale ale or IPA this is never a problem, but with the pumpkin or stout it becomes a problem. The pumpkin makes the wort extremely thick even after the addition of hot water for the mashout and the flow of wort slows to a mere trickle. Not to worry though. Having faced this exact situation in the past we have come up with a surefire remedy. Make a mess. A huge mess. More on this later.

The first step once our sparge was clearly stuck was to try and stir things up a bit with our paddle. Hopefully this would blend the cement like mixture enough to allow the wort to flow again. However, the downside was that it disturbed our grain bed which had given us nice clear wort up until this point. It got to be so that we had to stir every minute or so in order to continue even a modest flow of the now cloudy wort. Then came our next brilliant plan.

We found our solution in a grain bag left over from our time before the mash tun. So with great care taken to spill as much wort as possible over ourselves (hot wort, very hot wort…) we transferred the mess of pumpkin, grains and wort to another container, placed the grain bag inside our mash tun and then promptly transferred the mess back and into the grain bag. Messy enough? Not by Midnight standards. What followed was a steady process of pouring more sparge water over the grains and then as the flow out of the mash tun slowed we would pull the entire grain bag out of the mash tun to get the flow going again. Two things I should point out here: #1 The grain bag is also very hot, as in 170° F hot so whoever lifts it is getting a little burned. #2 All the grains plus pumpkin plus all the water it was holding is not only heavy, but the bagged mass has swollen to fill the whole mash tun, sealing itself in. The result is that pulling this out is like trying to pull the sword from the stone... with no arms.

In the end it worked. We had somewhat cloudy wort for our boil but hopefully we didn’t pull too many tannins into our finished beer.

Lessons for those who may try this:
#1 If you are using the El Cheapo mash tun as we were with the plumbing braid in the cooler, you are in for some trouble. The pumpkin comes out of the can as a paste and when you add this to your mash it creates a mixture with the consistency of fresh cement. I would suggest either upgrading your mash tun as we will or perhaps adding the pumpkin to your primary or secondary. This will open you up to the possibility of some contamination so be careful.
#2 It is a good idea to rack this brew into a secondary and let it condition and clarify. We had a very cloudy brew and one week in the primary didn't clarify it quite enough.
#3 Should you attempt this recipe have some homebrews on hand. I would suggest one case worth at a minimum. Let me tell you this would have REALLY eased the stress of trying to get this brew moving faster than a turtle... a 100 year old turtle... also the turtle is dead.

All jokes aside it was nonetheless fun as always and the brew should turn out delicious. On that note, crack open a homebrew of your own for you have made it through another of my blathering blog posts. Cheers!

Pumpkin Ale

October. It’s coming. Now we at Midnight Brewing Co don’t usually think so far into the future which is why our Christmas beer tastes best in March and our summer beers are best in the fall. However, from this point forward things will be different. As you can see from the title I am pondering our pumpkin ale.

Ideally it should be brewed so that it is ready for drinking enjoyment during the Halloween to Thanksgiving period. Last year was the first time we tried making a pumpkin beer and it actually turned out very well. However, we were restricted by the supply of fresh pumpkins which didn’t allow us to get our hands on pumpkin until early October.

So that means this time we are going to try something different. Most likely we will try pumpkin from a can and see how that goes. There is a bit of dissent within the staff of Midnight Brewing as to using anything but fresh, real pumpkin but we don’t really have much of a choice. To be safe though I would like to brew a second batch of the original recipe once we can get some fresh pumpkin.

One note on using actual pumpkin is that most recipes I have seen just require steaming/boiling of the pumpkin before using it in your brew. This will soften your pumpkin and make it easier to extract sugars and pumpkin flavors. However, what we did last year was to take our whole pumpkin, quarter it and then lightly roast it in the oven like when roasting red peppers. I don’t know whether or not roasting vs steaming/boiling makes a huge difference, but I think the caramelization from the roasting gives a richer flavor than merely steaming/boiling.

In any case, that’s what’s coming up so stay tuned and crack open a homebrew. Cheers!

Flour City Brewer's Festival

To all those readers within convenient driving distance of Rochester, clear your calendars on the 15th of August between the hours of 6pm and 10pm. The Flour City Brewer's Festival is coming to Rochester. Although nowhere near as large as most other beer festivals (27 breweries participating) it is nonetheless a great opportunity to try a wide variety of beers on the cheap. The $25 admission includes a tasting glass, unlimited samplings and a good time (Not that kind of good time!). I plan on actually taking some notes this year to get some ideas for new Midnight Brews. See you there?

Smoked Results

So it has been awhile since either of us has made a post. Be it lack of material (potentially), Godzilla taking a break from Japan to rampage through Rochester, NY (also likely) or perhaps sheer laziness (Do I need to even say?), we have been away from the blog for far too long. Apologies.

So without further ado a few words on the tasting of our recent experimental brew which was a smoked beer. The Rauchbiers that I have tried have always been darker, with a body about the consistency of milk. As a side note, when I talk about the body of a beer my range usually covers comparing to water, skim milk, 2% milk and cream. But I digress. One particular German Rauchbier most definitely tasted intensely like bacon. Although the beer was very much unique and interesting, I was not such a fan of drinking a beer that is would probably fit in well with your morning scrambled eggs and toast. We were basically looking to make a lighter beer that still had some smokey goodness to it.

Originally we were going to use a combination of wheat and 2-row as our base malt and then throw in a pound or so of the smoked malt. This would hopefully give us a beer with the flavors of a light wheat to balance out the smokeyness that can at times be overwhelming (read my beer tastes like the bacon I had for breakfast). Unfortunately our LHBS was out of the 10-lb bags of wheat so we were forced to choose between a pilsner malt and a lager malt. This could be where things went a bit… awry.

The beer I tasted the other day wasn’t bad per se. It had a lighter smokey character than the bacon beer, it wasn’t quite so dark and the body was light as well. Very light. Like water light. The beer was drinkable, unlike our attempt at raspberry wheat (RIP), but it did not have the body to match to the smoke. All in all it did not come together very well. To improve we definitely need to try using the wheat malt to give it more body and then go from there.
In any case, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, try, try again. Cheers!

Mega Brewing Company

Well it looks like the deal finally went through. Europe's InBev is buying Anheuser-Busch for $52 Billion. Not that I am necessarily a fan of their products but I am a little disappointed to see a major American beer brand fall to Europe. From this comes the world's largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev. I wonder if this will change anything.

Brewer in the Dark

I had planned on making a post this week about the Smoked Wheat that was recently bottled when I ran into a problem. Although not really a brewing related problem per se, it makes talking about the Smoked Wheat difficult. You see when I came home from work on monday to my new apartment that I just moved into none of the lights would turn on, clocks were off and it was basically dark. Yes the power company shut off the electricity to my apartment. Apparently the previous tenant had the power scheduled to be turned off early but didn't really let me know.

In any case, this means that the Smoked Wheats that I had tossed into the fridge were nice and toasty warm. Between you and me, I don't think tasting a warm beer is going to give me a very accurate impression of how it turned out... at all.

So until my electricity is turned back on this weekend I have nothing new for you readers. As for B brewer, he is currently gallivanting around Austria and Hungary. Hopefully he will have some brewery notes to share with us all when he gets back! In the meantime, crack open a cold homebrew and enjoy this Independence Day. Cheers!

Smoked Wheat

Last weekend was a Bottle/Brew Day and a long one at that (8+ hours).

Looking to further experiment/refine our beer we decided to add a new element to our wheat beer, smoked malt.

One might say this would be an interesting addition, but being home brewers (why else would you read this?) you know no fear for new ingredients. We here at Midnight Brewing on the other hand are haunted by such beers such as the scotch ale that tasted like it was brewed by DuPont and the infamous Raspberry wheat that still lurks behind every corner. (I am not kidding, this beer has followed me through 2 moves! I think A Brewer is dropping them off at my place whenever he comes by, but thats for another post).

We have always talked about making a rauch beer, but have yet to commit the $$ for such an experiment. This seemed like a good transition brew to understand the power of the smoke.

A Brewer thought it might be a good idea to smoke our own, but that was shot down by me after I found some smoked malt at our LHBS. Who knows, if this comes out good we will probably experiment with smoking our own someday to get some unique flavors.

Preliminary tests of the smoked malt showed that it actually brought out the orange peel in our other wheat beer that we bottled the same day. So we forged ahead and brewed 'er up.

We decided on Fuggles and Willamette on this brew to try to accentuate the "woodiness" of the smoked malt. Results in coming weeks.

Other highlights:

New attachment for the wort chiller:
My Dad (fellow Homebrewer) took an interest in the efficiency of our chiller and picked up some new adapters that got rid of the annoying leak that our old attachment had. We actually timed our chill and it hit 80F in just under an hour. Anyone have any suggestions? I have heard of people chilling in 15 min before. I think the diameter of our copper tubing could be increased. Next brew we are going to actually do a curve of our chilling and post it here.





Midnight Brewing First:
We actually named one of our beers! The Belgian Whit that we bottled was christened "Fuzzy Logic". This was after many hours of research of Belgium on Wikipedia and fun with babel translation. Anyone know who Clovis is? Anyways since we still don't have labels for any of our brews yet, so we must resort to the 'ol sharpie on the cap trick to distinguish between brews. So I got a case of Florida (FL) beer in my basement...ok I tried

Mystery Solved:
We determined why our first experiment in fermentation (wine making) went south after retrying some pH paper on our latest brew. Turns out A Brewer forgot how the pH scale works, extremely acidic is not 14... not to mention that we both have at least 3 years of chem courses under our belt...sigh...I think some beverages might have been involved in this confusion...


Does this look like its above or below 7?



Fermenter repaired:
The last few brews have been scary, as we have been relying on a sub par airlock after our rubber o-ring gave out on us a few brews back. We finally repaired this with some caulk.







And for your viewing pleasure:




A Brewer and B Brewer cooling the wort. Note, recycling of water, which I spent 30 min dispensing over my garden. Note 2: Kalik and Guiness T-shirts! you would think we actually liked beer!

New Blogs

Added a few more blogs over on the right. Your right not mine. Check 'em out.

Build a Better Wort Chiller

So we finally enhanced the wort chiller several weeks ago, but there hasn’t been anything posted (read: I am lazy). The wait is over friends because here you have it our wonderfully more efficient wort chiller!

To review: Our immersion wort chiller is not particularly efficient because the coils of copper tubing end up just piling on top of each other in the bottom of the kettle like a slinky. To fix this we decided to get some heavy duty copper wire and weave it in and out between the twists of the tubing in order to hold the coils apart. That way we could actually get some cooling at the level of the wort near the top of the kettle where it is hottest (Heat rises…).

To get supplies I made a stop over at Home Depot which I would say is the store we visit second most after our homebrew shop. I have always thought that one of the most fun parts of homebrewing is cobbling random hardware together into workable equipment. Originally I had thought that 12ft of wire was going to be more than enough to make about three separate columns of wire up and down the chiller. In the end we only had enough to do it twice. This wire is 12 gauge insulated copper wire, that we stripped. As far as wire stripping is concerned, you should be sure you have wire strippers ahead of time because stripping 12 feet of wire with a box cutter is not fun. At all. I am talking blisters.

In any case, after we finished it turns out that we had made it about three or four inches too tall so I would suggest you take the time to measure out the normal height of the hot wort in your kettle and build your chiller from there. We on the other hand, prefer the ass backwards way of making the chiller, finding out it’s too tall and then bending the topmost weaves to compact the whole structure while it is sitting in near boiling wort burning our fingers. Yes, we went to college.

It works much better now than it used to. Note that you want the cooling water to enter the topmost coils and go through the bottom coils last (Again, heat rises…). We cut the cooling time to go from a boil to pitching temperature by about fifteen to twenty minutes.

There you go readers, you have finally gotten some useful information from us! Today we are bottling the Belgian (Not named yet but trying to avoid going with 2.0 on this one as with the stout) so hopefully get some notes about that up later. Cheers!

DISASTER in NY!

Update Below 3:30pm

Catastrophe struck F.X. Matt Brewing Co of Utica NY when a fire decimated the brewery. For those not familiar with it, the family run brewery makes the Saranac line of beers, found in bottles, many bars and in my fridge. They are one of our favorite regional breweries with unique brews like their pomegranate wheat.

The blaze began Thursday evening, potentially from welding work. After fighting the fire for 14 ½ hours the fire was declared under control this morning, though the fire department will continue to put out hotspots. Estimated loss at this point is $10 to $20 million. Read more here.

Truly a tragedy, our thoughts and prayers go out to the family and staff of F.X. Matt Brewing. Although it will probably not happen soon, we certainly hope they will be able to recover from this disaster so we will be able to continue to enjoy their delicious brews. Best of luck guys.

UPDATE: BEER SUPPLY UNAFFECTED! The damage to the brewery was almost entirely to the canning and packaging area. The bottling operation looks to be salvageable. Fermenting, aging and kegging were unaffected so the brewery will still be producing beer and likely outsource the canning side of the operation.

This is one thing I think is so great about brewing, the camaraderie. People help each other in the brewing field, whether it be craft breweries or homebrewers. Several breweries have already offered to give F.X. Matt Brewing help in covering the side of their operation that was lost in the fire giving them the option of loading the beer into tankers and shipping it to other breweries for canning.

Well that’s the end of my ramblings. Kick back, relax, and enjoy your Friday with a Saranac (or other F.X. Matt Brewing Co beer). Cheers!

Wishlist

After pawing through the blogs of the usual suspects (Monday Night Brewing, CNY Brew & Bearded Brewer) I found myself a bit envious. Not to say our operation is by any means pitiful but we are like the Oliver Twist of brewing equipment. Please sir, I want some more! So I came up with a wish list of what I would like to someday acquire for Midnight Brewing.

1) Electronic scale
2) Aeration stone w/pump
3) Plate Chiller
4) 100qt cooler converted to mashtun
5) Larger Kettle or another kettle plus additional propane burner
6) Keg + draft equipment
7) Steel conical fermenator (7gal if not larger)
8) Temperature controlled place for fermenator (converted fridge or build an insulated box)

So everything is kind of ordered from most feasible to least feasible. It is a wish list though so ideally money is going to drop from the sky and presto we bag the whole list in one go. Any other suggestions? If you suddenly had lets say $1000 for brewing equipment what would you do? In the meantime, homebrew, crack one open. Cheers!

PS. Tasting notes on Stout v3.0 and brewing notes on our Belgian to follow!

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!

What to Brew Next?

Ah the eternal question facing every brewer. "So I have this beer and it's great but what do I make now?" Well I have a beer (Belgian at the moment) and I have little idea of what to do next.

So we were pondering this question and came upon the idea of making a really intense IPA along the lines of an Imperial. Two reasons for this: #1 One of our tasters is always commenting (read: complaining) about how our beers are a mouthful and she likes really hoppier beers. Okay, so some recent brews have been a bit thicker I'll admit, but that is because of the maltiness that we get and maybe a bit of over zealousness with some oats... And #2 Hop shortage. We all know about it. We have all read article after article on the subject. We all know it's here and so I won't go into it.

In any case, what with this business of hops being scarce the thinking was, wouldn't it be nice to have one last big hurrah before we have to start making modifications to our other recipes to cope with the loss of our usual hops (Ingenuity and creativity be damned!)? Well it would be nice. So with that in mind B brewer paid a visit to our local homebrew shop and lo and behold the shop is essentially out of hops. Out, empty, gone, devoid of hops, there is a hop vacancy, the lights are on but no hops are home, need I go on?

Staff teleconference time to discuss the problem. B Brewer suggest we bitter with what Anheuser-Busch uses... urine. Okay sorry cheap shot (though true perhaps? I once heard a craft brewer say his favorite beer is Budweiser because every time he drinks one it makes even his worst beer taste better). I had no suggestions. Teleconference over.

Maybe we could just throw in the mish mash of obscure hops they have left. We could call it... Hop Medley, Hop Melange, Hoppodge, Hop Jumble (can you tell I just visited Thesaurus.com?).

Well readers, we now have a plan. IPA. Ordinarily this brew would be happening today but B brewer has a group meeting for class and I am sick with one bastard of a cold. So this brew will happen likely this week late at night or next weekend. Stay tuned for the results.