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!