Due to a hectic work schedule earlier this year I haven’t been able to use up much vacation time.  For the last two months I’ve been taking every Friday off to burn up some vacation days.  Instead of spending my time playing video games or working on my various other projects, I’ve been dedicating Fridays to beer.

Brewing isn’t a very demanding hobby.  In fact, you can go weeks at a time without doing anything but stare at fermenting buckets.  Since I never do anything small and I had a weekly “free day” on my hands, I decided to see if I could brew a new batch every week.  I also started to reserve Fridays for doing the maintenance on my previous batches.  This basically consists of transferring beer between containers, taking readings, taste testing, and cleaning equipment.

With two batches in bottles and four batches in various stages of fermentation I’m amazed at how little work it takes to keep it all up in the air.  Even with the extra work of juggling multiple batches I can do all the maintenance and brew a fresh batch in four or five hours. Most of that time is spent sitting around watching TV on my Laptop and making sure the beer doesn’t boil over.

Unfortunately, there is a dark side to brewing large quantities of beer…bottling.  Cleaning and delabeling bottles is no fun.  Bottling itself isn’t so bad with my wife helping out, but I’d hate that as well if I had to do it solo.  To remedy this problem my parents got me a mini fridge as an early Christmas present which I promptly attacked with power tools and converted into a kegerator.  Now instead of making sure 50+ bottles are squeaky clean, I only have to worry about one five gallon keg.  Kegs are also cheap at about $25 each, so I can always get a few more if necessary.

I don’t know how long I’ll keep up the turbo brewing schedule, but it’s nice to know I’ll have plenty of tasty beer on tap for the next few months.