Time to catch up a bit.

It's been a busy fall (well, winter now) for brewing at the Beer Lab. Here's where we stand:

- The coffee stout has been bottled for a while and is currently aging and carbonating. Wasn't quite there the last time I checked one, but what I tasted was promising -- a good dose of hops up front, with the coffee dominating the aftertaste.

- I've taken a stab at gluten-free No. 2, a pumpkin spice ale. It's currently resting in the secondary fermentor and is lovely to behold:

It's kept the pumpkin-pie color all through the past few days. Very promising.

Once again, the recipe came from Homebrewtalk.com before being slightly modified by me. Specifically, it's this one.

- And in the works right now? A gingerbread porter, billed as "Christmas punching you in the mouth." It's got cinnamon sticks, cloves, allspice and fresh-grated ginger I just prepared a few minutes ago. How can I pass that up?

The knobby lump is the ginger. It smells much better than that.

And again, I grabbed it from the web forums. So, hoping it lives up to the hype.

This will be my first recipe trying liquid yeast as opposed to dry yeast. I've read great arguments for either from fans of both... we'll see how it goes.

When done, all three of these will fill up all five bottle cases I keep on hand. Exciting!