Greetings from afar

Today I opened my mailbox to a note from a Monday Night Brewery faithful in Washington, D.C.:

3 J’s:

I have attached what I consider to be Monday Night Brewery Pint Glass Pornography. This is not safe for work!

What you see is an MNB Pint Glass fully supplied with Troegs’ Nugget Nectar Imperial Amber. While I’d love to be drinking an MNB brew on this Thursday evening, the hoppy red wonder that is the Nugget Nectar will more than suffice.

Hope this email finds you enjoying life in the ATL.

Your Friend and Supporter,
Sir William

While Sir William’s claim to royalty is disputed, his ability at spotting blaspemous behavior is not. However, in this case we make an exception. Because we will soon be unveiling a new Monday Night Brewery logo, in which the monk plays no part. If you’d like to get caught up on where we stand with the brand, read this. Otherwise, just know that we’re putting the few finishing touches on the new look and will be sharing it for feedback next week.

Sir William, enjoy your MNB pint glass. It will soon be a collector’s item, worth your weight in gold doubloons.

MNB featured in today’s Thrillist

I would like to announce that the days of being the relatively unknown underdog are over. We are now famous. This has been our secret goal since the beginning, and since we have fulfilled it, we can finally disband. Just kidding, we’re still starting a brewery. But we DID get a nice little write-up in today’s Thrillist.

Thrillist is a city-based newsletter delivering the newest and freshest stuff. I think of it as a Daily Candy for guys. Don’t ask me how I know what Daily Candy is. I said DON’T ASK! Here’s the text of the write-up if you’re having trouble reading the optimized image above:

After meeting in a Bible study group, the MNB crew committed to the obvious goal: open a brewery by 2010. In the meantime, they blog progress reports, offer helpful home-brewing tips, share stories of technical difficulties, sell logo’d t-shirts & pint glasses, and announce new arrivals like their long-awaited BTU burner and partner Jeff’s new son — future heir to either a sweet family business, or a huge surplus of logo’d t-shirts and pint glasses.

Nice. It sounds like something we would write about ourselves. I think I could get used to this “free press” thing…

Beer wars: Travis gets a new website. It sucks.

A little while ago our mortal enemy Travis got himself a brand new website. I know what you’re thinking: But isn’t that like putting lip stick on a dead possum? Yes. A dead possum that can’t brew a decent beer.

And we’ll be the first to admit: we’ve given Travis and his merry crew of misfits a little too much leeway lately. Frankly, I think it was our pity that led us to leave him alone. Brewing crappy beer up in St. Buttcrack, New York in the dead of winter. It’s a sad story. We actually tried to send him a care package, but the post office wouldn’t deliver that far north. Next step is to hire an eskimo and a moose to make the trek for us.

It’s easy to forget about him. I mean, our beer is pretty awesome. And we don’t waste our time with Bud Light clones. So Travis, we raise a glass of quality beer to you. I hope things pick up for you soon. May your new website not suck as bad as the old one.

Note: our war with Travis is an ongoing saga of good over evil. See past battles here (or his versions here).

Our new burner arrives, just in time for our brewing hiatus

Guess what came in the mail this weekend? The 210K BTU burner we ordered last February! Yes, you heard correct, last February. There were various complications with our order including a deceased homebrew shop owner, unreturned phone calls, and large periods of time between us remembering we’d actually ordered a burner. And we can’t wait to try this thing out. In at least a month.

We won’t be brewing tonight ? or next week ? or until you hear differently ? because ANOTHER package came in the mail this weekend too. LITTLE BABY TEDDY! In what is surely the scariest picture we’ve ever posted, Joel is shown holding Jeff and Hannah’s new baby at the hospital yesterday. Jeff and Hannah must have been preoccupied. There’s no other reason to let Joel handle a baby.

But seriously, look how cute Teddy is. More on little baby Teddy later, after Jeff gets a little sleep.

Time-saving homebrewing tips

We’ve been brewing for over 2 years now. And we’ve been brewing on Monday nights, when time is limited. It used to take us 6.5-7 hours to brew a 10 gallon all-grain batch, including cleanup, kegging/bottling and any transferring. Now we can do the same amount of work in 4.5-5 hours. And that includes moving from a 1 hour boil to a 1.5 hour boil, so in essence we’re down to 4-4.5 hours. What has changed? Why are we more efficient now?

Below are some tips on a shorter brew day that we’ve learned the hard way. Chances are you’re already doing some or all of these. But if you’re looking to shave a little bit of time off of your brewing schedule, take a look. If you have any additional time-saving techniques, we’d love to hear them!

For those of you looking for the short version, see #4 and #6 for our 2 greatest time-saving techniques.

1) Think ahead and have ample supplies on hand
Let’s start with the basics. There are certain things we’re always running out of, so we’re sure to keep stocked up on them to avoid making unnecessary trips to the store during brewing. On the list of “don’t forgets” for us: propane, oxygen (see #8 below), teflon tape and clove cigarettes (though some would list these as a “nice to have,” we would argue that they are a necessity). Your list is likely different.

2) Brew with friends

Yes, it’s true. Brewing with friends is more fun than brewing alone. But it also enables you to tackle things simultaneously and usually you’ve got someone free for cleaning up as you go along. Crucial. We’ve gotten to the point where we “deputize” some of the die-hards to give us greater multitasking flexibility.

3) Mill grains beforehand
To be honest, we rarely mill our grains early. But when we do, it’s always worth it. Getting the mash started is always the first priority when brewing, so it’s nice to have the grains ready to go.

4) Use hot water (from tub) for mash and sparge water
Starting with hot water (instead of cold hose water) was the single biggest “duh” for us when saving time. Heating water is one of the most time-consuming parts of brewing. And while having a powerful burner helps, starting with 140 degree water instead of 60 degree water helps even more. We tote piping hot water from Jeff’s luxurious jacuzzi tub for the mash and the sparge. Added benefit: saves on propane costs.

5) Run sparge full open
Opening up the sparge to capacity is a recent addition to this list. Before we were constrained by the speed (or slowness) of our sparge arm. But we upgraded our sparge arm for $15 and started opening up the wort as much as we could. And before you ask, no, it didn’t negatively affect our starting gravity. At all.

6) Sparge onto a burner
This is probably the 2nd greatest time saver we’ve adopted. We sparge directly into our brewpot, which is already resting on the propane burner. When it’s about 40% full, we turn the burner on. We found that this allows us to get to volume we need while slowly heating it to near-boil. So when we’re done sparging, we’re already at 200 degrees and only need to wait 5 or so minutes to start the boil. BAM.

7) Use multiple cooling techniques
Cooling wort can take forever. We used to use a high-tech plate chiller, which was incredibly speedy. Unfortunately, we couldn’t live with the fact that we wouldn’t see where the wort was actually going. We boiled that thing twice each night and still couldn’t get it clean enough. One we stopped using it, we also stopped having sanitation problems. So now we use a simple copper wort chiller + an ice bath. The combo works very nicely. We immediately take the brewpot off the burner and move it into a big basin filled with the runoff from the chilling. When the temperature hits 100 degrees, we add ice (and salt, for an added kick) to take it down to 80. Giving the wort a stir every few minutes helps too. I’ve seen fancier cooling techniques using pumps and coolers. And who knows, maybe we’ll get there. But the time spent cooling also gives us the opportunity to clean up and prepare the conical fermenter to receive her bounty.

8) Use oxygen to aerate wort
Shaking carboys for 10 minutes after adding the yeast isn’t the most time-consuming thing in the world, but it’s still much faster to aerate with oxygen for 30 seconds. Plus, it’s almost impossible to shake a big conical fermenter.

9) Clean up as you go
Even with all of the time savers, there’s still time to clean up as you brew. So get the least fun part of brewing over with as quickly as you can.

Any other time-savers? Leave them as comments!

Brewing recap: “Stuck like a truck, truck, truck” edition

Last night marked the last Monday we’ll be brewing for at least a month. Little baby Teddy should be popping out soon, so we’re taking a maternity leave of sorts. Nonetheless, last night was a great time. We had a lot of new people. We had a fire. We had snow. We used hot water for the cleanser and sanitizer (definitely recommended if you don’t like to torture yourself in freezing temperatures).

Which leads us to the title of our post. Jeff got the mash started early, which would have been great, except Jeff isn’t all that familiar with the subtle nuances of our mashing equipment. So we ended up with a stuck sparge. First time in months:

It was REALLY stuck. We had to throw the whole mess into some buckets and clean out the mashtun. You may be wondering, “Wait, if this was Jeff’s fault, why didn’t he help with the hard part?” Good question. We think he was inside working on his spray tan. If you’re about to be a father, you don’t want to be white and pasty, that’s for sure.

Fortunately, there were no further complications and the scotch ale should be ready to drink when we start brewing again. We’ve actually come to rely on the iPhone timer for hop additions. Last night we had two timers synced up in case one of us was busy.

See ya’ll soon!

Brewing on the early side tonight

We’ll be brewing a little earlier than normal this evening, so it would behoove you to stop by anytime after 7pm, as we’ll likely be shutting down around 10pm.  Tonight we’re brewing up another batch of our crowd-pleasing Drafty Kilt Scotch Ale. We should have stout, IPA and Drafty Kilt on tap as well. And if those weren’t enough reasons to make an appearance, here’s a big one:

This will most likely be the last time we brew for at least a month (possibly longer) because of Jeff’s baby being born soon. We’re extremely happy for Jeff and Hannah, though there’s a small part of us that’s nervous. I mean, is Jeff the kind of guy we really want procreating?

Hope to see you guys tonight ? bring layers! And sign up to receive text message alerts about brewing each Monday!