I've been fairly busy for the first few months of this year, but my schedule for the next few months looks like it should be pretty normal. So, of course, I've decided to fill my "extra" time with brewing.

On Thursday of last week, I brewed a double batch of Vienna lager -- one carboy pitched with White Labs WLP920 (Old Bavarian Lager) yeast and the other pitched with Wyeast 2124 (Bohemian Lager) yeast. I tried 2124 on another Vienna lager I made recently and liked it, so I thought I'd try it on my "standard" Vienna recipe (which appeared in the January 2006 issue of BYO under the name Red Ball Express).

I bought a refractometer recently and the Vienna lager was the first full batch of beer that I got to use it on. Using the refractometer was very simple and I could get gravity readings in a couple seconds from a couple drops of wort -- a very cool brewing tool. I wish I had gotten one years ago.

At the last Austin ZEALOTS homebrew club meeting, we talked about doing a "speed brew." The idea was, I would post a beer recipe to our Yahoo email group the Friday before the meeting. Interested club members would brew it and bring it to the next meeting, just 8 days away. The recipe I posted on Friday was a low-gravity English ale, very similar to the Bonneville Flats Bitter recipe of mine in the May 2006 issue of BYO. The new recipe was a little lower in original gravity (1.036) and had a little dab of biscuit malt thrown in; otherwise, it was pretty much the same thing.

So Sunday night (6 days before the meeting), I brewed my batch of "speed brew," It's bubbling along nicely now. I'm hoping that it finishes fermenting by Wednesday. If so, I'll rack it to a keg on Thursday and carbonate it until Saturday, then bottle off a couple bottles and take it to the meeting. (I'm letting the beer force carbonate under pressure for three days rather than "shake carbonating" it at the last minute because I think you lose foam when you shake up a keg to carbonate it.)

So, in the not-too-distant future, I should have some homebrew ready to drink. My first "super lager" should be ready one of these weeks. The sour Flanders red is conditioning happily (I hope). The Viennas are doing nicely and the "speed brew" is sitting right behind me right now and I can hear the airlock blurping away. In the next few weeks, I should be brewing at least a beer a week and I'll keep this blog updated as I go.