Return from Hibernation

Well, not much has been happening on this front for a week or so. My heat has been out since Saturday, and for those of you not in the DC Metro area - it's been really freaking cold here lately. It's pretty tough to force yourself to do anything except stay warm when it's 40 degrees indoors.

I'm positing switching up my brewing schedule to emphasize frequency of batches instead of my usual approach which is very laidback and time insensitive.

Generally, I let my beer sit in primary for about 4 weeks then I bottle it, which means it's at least 6 weeks before I know how the batch came out, and it's fairly pointless to tweak a batch with inconclusive results. I'm considering changing to doing half-batches twice as often - instead of 5 gallons and a 6 week schedule, 2.5 gallons every 4 weeks (bottle after 2, condition for 2). Lagers, of course, will take longer.

Essentially I could put in place a rotation of brews, eventually bottling and brewing on the same day:

• Week 1: Bottle #3, Brew #1
• Week 2: Bottle #4, Brew #2
• Week 3: Bottle #1, Brew beer #3
• Week 4: Bottle #2, Brew #4

This schedule is pretty intensive with a full time job, but bottling a half batch should only take about an hour instead of the usual two, and I could do the bottling during the mash.

I only have two concerns with this approach: my mash tun makes it difficult to do low gravity beers already (a half batch of low gravity beer will give me essentially no grain bed to work with), and lagers will throw this schedule out of whack.

I'll have to ponder solutions to this problem.