Tag Archives: KBTX

Midnight Hour Brewery

If You Saw Me On The TeeVee

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Thanks for finding me (see the interview video if you are a regular reader). Homebrewing is a rewarding, useful hobby. It can be easy or intricate, scientific or artful. For the impatient, join the Texas Aggieland Brew Club on Facebok and read about the process on HowToBrew. Or get in touch with me personally.

The beer you saw me making was a three gallon batch of nettle beer. It is a recipe I want to start experimenting with. The beer I drank throughout the interview was a Belgian Tripel. Typically, homebrewers make five gallons of beer at a time so most of the equipment is sized appropriately.

To get started making your own beer you need a few specialized tools and some basic kitchen gadgets. Homebrew specialty stores sell equipment kits that will get you started. Check out Austin Homebrew Supply – they have a good web store and it only takes a day for UPS to get to B/CS. You will also need a large kettle, six to seven gallons is ideal, however I started off with a twelve quart pot. When you purchase equipment, also pick out some recipe ingredients. Austin homebrew has around 120 pre-assembled recipes that come out to around $0.55 a bottle.

A great way to learn the hobby is to get together with some other homebrewers and make beer. The TAbc meets monthly on the third Friday evening of the month. We have a number of experienced brewers and beer lovers to answer questions.

Midnight Hour Brewery

KBTX Interview

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I just wrapped an interview with Meredith Stancik from the local news station. She runs a feature called Saving You Money and this time around is spotlighting homebrewing. I got half a day off work to make some beer for the camera – an experimental one (read about it) – and chat about the hobby.

The focus of the piece is how homebrewing is cheaper than store bought beer, which I believe is true. Austin Homebrew Supply, where I buy what I don’t get in bulk elsewhere, sells a basic equipment kit for $80 and about 150 recipe kits that come out to $0.50 a bottle. If you make only one 5 gallon batch of beer it tallies up to around $2.00 a bottle. After three you are down to almost a dollar per cool, refreshing draught.

We also talked about my beer consulting work and judging experience. I put in a plug for the homebrew club. The show will air Thursday, September 24th at 10:00pm. I’m curious to see the final product. If possible I’ll get the video up on my blog.

Midnight Hour Brewery

Nettle Beer – A Beginning

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Nettle tea helps promote kidney function, reducing the risk for kidney stones and gout. I get attacks of gout when I am not careful what I eat and many of my family members have kidney stones. I do not drink a lot of tea, and rather than changing my habits (putting me dangerously close to sounding old) I thought it more appropriate to get nettles elsewhere. Enter homebrew.

The cup of nettle tea I made to get a feel for the flavor tasted vegetal and slightly peppery. Few people, me included, want to drink beer that smells of boiled vegetables. My thinking went to covering it up with a healthy dose of American hops and some big malt. That was yesterday and I didn’t have any Amarillo on hand… or yeast for that matter. The nearest LHBS is a day away by UPS. Because I was being interviewed for a homebrewing segment on the local news there were timing constraints. The beer had to be rolling at 2:30 when the reporter arrived. Not wanting to pay for overnight 10 AM delivery shipping I placed an order and crossed my fingers.

I should have known better. UPS usually delivers to my house around 7 PM. Not to worry, I wasn’t really sure what kind of beer I would make today. Grabbing the first bag of hop pellets from the freezer, I settled on German Pearle. Next I went to the larder and ripped open new 55-lb bags of Vienna and Munich malt. Here’s what happened:

3 gallons of Some Nettle Beer

Fermentables

  • 4 lbs Vienna
  • 2 lbs Munich

Doughed in 2 gallons of 160° F water (mostly RO with some tap water for “minerals”). The mash hit 157° F for 40 minutes. Using an ad-hoc brewing setup I batched sparged through a colander and collected a little more than 3 gallons of 10% brix sweet wort. So far so good. The reporter arrived right on time as the wort was starting to boil.

Bittering

  • 1 oz 8.1% AA Perle 60 minutes
  • 6 oz dried loose leaf nettles 60 minutes

I wasn’t sure how much nettles to add – most of the recipes you find online measure by the fresh bucket or the peck. They went in until I had enough to almost overflow my kettle. By then the wort had a sharp nastiness to it signaling to me that it was a good time to stop.

We conducted the interview while the nastiness boiled. Right now I have just about 3 gallons of 13.6% brix wort cooling slowly as I wait for UPS to deliver some Safale US-05 yeast. The slow cool means that the resulting beer will have a lot of DMS, but it is a veggie beer to begin with…. Oh yeah, batch sparging with a colander causes a lot of splashing and hot-side aeration. Maybe my nettle beer won’t start.

Looking forward to improving on this recipe with a little more preparation.