Red Ale update and plans to come...

On Saturday I finally got around to kegging the Irish Red Ale. Unfortunately, it was right before Jonas's first birthday party (like, literally, fifteen minutes before the party... I had cleaned the basement and my two options were hide the carboy or rack it to a keg, and as it was two weeks since I brewed and the Kräusen had fallen I decided to go with the latter) and because I was in a hurry I didn't take a gravity reading. Eh, no biggie...

In the meantime, I have some plans a'brewin' (no pun intended--at least initially--but I'm not changing it now). First, next weekend our friends Mark and Marlowe of Zoo Brew fame (who co-brewed our Mr. Kim's Secret Microbrew) will be coming over to brew an Old Ale. We're calling it 1908, in honor of the year my beloved Chicago Cubs last won a World Series. We're planning on aging some of it on oak and we'll each stash a bottle away to save until the Cubs finally bring another championship to the North Side (well, all of us except Marlowe, who's a Sox fan).

Depending on how things work out this month, I may really get things cranking. I have a couple of other beers in the pipeline... I'd like to try brewing our 59° Fahrenheit Maibock again and I'm also itching to whip up another batch of our None More Buzzed coffee stout (though now that Jamie and Christine are in Minnesota I probably won't be able to score freshly-roasted espresso beans from them again).

Oh, and sooner or later I hope to head back up to Metropolitan Brewing to brew the first (non-test) batch of I-Beam Alt. I haven't tried the test batch myself yet, but I got some feedback from Tracy the other day and hopefully with some minor tweaking the good folks at Metro will actually bring a true Düsseldorf-style Alt to Chicago!