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!