Club Updates & November Meeting
Hello Brew Bombers!
A bunch of updates for you all. As usual I’ll try to keep things to the point.
CMBTC Competition Winner
Congratulations to Chuck Mackenzie for winning the CMBTC competition. Sherwin and Aaron really loved his American Porter “The Night Porter”. The main prize is a brew day on the CMBTC brewing system using his recipe, and the beer will be served at the CMBTC Christmas Open House. Thanks again to everyone who participated!
Pro/Am Brew Challenge Registration is OPEN!
If you have any homebrew ready, you’re highly encouraged to enter. Even if you don’t think it’s a particularly good brew, enter it anyway! You’ll still get valuable feedback from BJCP certified judges. All details found at https://beerawardsplatform.com/2024-pro-am-brew-challenge.
Judging is November 2-5. If you’d like to volunteer as a steward or a judge, even for just a day, please reach out! This is the 10th Pro/Am, so let’s make it a great one!
Tap Handles
You have one more week to pre-order your tap handles. Click Here to place your order before October 15th. We currently have 16 pre-orders, but we need to hit 25 to make sure we get our discount. It might be a while before we do this again so don’t miss your chance!
Creative Competition
We’re still working on finalizing the location for the creative competition, but you should start planning your brews now as judging will be happening during the January meeting.
This year’s creative competition is all Spice, Herb, Vegetable Beers. Since the style is inherently creative we’ve decided not to have rules around dollar/spend limits and no restrictions on where you shop. Just make sure you understand and follow the BJCP style guide – have a base style and provide a description of added SHV. If you have debatable ingredients, be prepared to defend them (i.e.: you used a fruit, but there are more dominant spices).
Club Kit
The votes are in and this year’s club kit will be a German Weissbier! If you have a recipe you’d like to share as a starting point, please let me know. Steve will be hosting the rest of the exec to do a test brew at his place in a couple of weeks.
Once we have done a test batch and make final decisions on the recipe we’ll place our order. If all goes well we hope to have the kits ready for pickup shortly after the holidays.
November Meeting
Our next meeting is on Tuesday November 5th at Oxus. Since we have the Pro/Am permit, If you have some homebrew you think is great and you want to share, or if you’re just looking to get feedback and advice from others, plan to bring some samples! The meeting will be all about “evaluating homebrew” so we’ll be going through the five main areas of assessment found on typical judge scoresheets: appearance, aroma, flavor, mouthfeel, and general impressions.
Cheers!
Dan Molinski
October Meeting, Tap Handles, Club kit & More
Hello Brew Bombers!
It’s time for another monthly update chock full of awesome news. I’ll try to keep everything brief but informative.
September Recap
Our season opening meeting went well with 22 people in attendance. Steve did a great job presenting on “how to do beer competitions good”. His presentation and template spreadsheet for tracking your competition entries are available HERE. Our club is currently in 6th place nationally on the Brewer of the Year circuit, which is the best we’ve ever been (so far). Let’s keep it up! If you have any beers laying around, consider entering them into some of the remaining competitions this year.
October Meeting
Our next meeting will be 7pm, Tuesday October 1st at the Canadian Malting Barley Technical Centre (CMBTC), 303 Main St. They’ll be announcing the winner of their competition at this meeting, and we’re looking at changing things up from the usual “talk and tour” they do, and instead doing some kind of “testing tour” where we focus on their lab equipment and the kinds of tests they do.
As a reminder, they’re in a secured government building so make sure to arrive at 7pm SHARP because they have to meet us at the door and escort us up to their space.
Pro/Am Brew Challenge
Dave Cole, Steph Barten, and team are busy preparing for this year’s Pro/Am and are always looking for people to volunteer. In particular, they need judges, stewards, and auditors from November 2-5. If you can help out, even for just a day, visit proam.beer to contact them. Oh, and definitely enter some beers into this competition!
Club Branded Tap Handles
We’re taking orders for club branded tap handles! The folks at Tap Handles To Go are giving us a discount (provided we order at least 25 tap handles). There are 4 designs to choose from, two full-color, and two back & white. Each with or without a chalkboard space. Since we don’t want to have a bunch of inventory sitting around this is how it will work:
- From now until October 15th, CLICK HERE to place your order
- Pay us for your order before Oct.15. If your payment is not received you won’t get your tap handles.
- We’ll place the bulk order with Tap Handles To Go on October 16th.
- Pick them up when they arrive!
Facebook Group
Last year we set up a new Facebook Group for club members as an alternate means of connecting and having discussions (because long email threads can get pretty annoying). We only allowed active members at first, but now we’re opening it up to everyone. Post pictures, ask questions, engage with each other. There’s also an associated group chat on Facebook Messenger you can join.
Club Kit Survey
If you’re a fully paid member, you’re entitled to vote for this season’s club kit. The options are:
- Irish Red Ale
- Scottish Ale
- German Weissbier
- Tropical/Juicy Hazy IPA
Go HERE to submit your preferences. We’ll announce the winner at the October meeting.
Creative Competition
This season’s club creative competition is all about Spice, Herb, and Vegetable Beers. As with last year we plan to get a permit so that we can sample and evaluate your beers during our January 14th meeting. Time flies, so start planning!
Cheers!
Dan Molinski
September Meeting & Other News
Nonsuch Big Brew
The American Brown Ale we brewed at Nonsuch, officially name “Bush League” will be on tap at The Common as of September 1st.
The official release party will be on Saturday September 7th at 2pm on the patio at Nonsuch.
They’ve asked for a rough headcount so they can prepare for the influx of beer and food orders, so if you plan to attend, please RSVP here. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to attend. Bring all your friends and family!
September Meeting
We kick off the new season at 7pm, Tuesday September 10th at Sookram’s.
Steve Shaw will be presenting about homebrew competitions: What you should know
The vote for this season’s club kit style will kick off (on the website).
CMBTC Competition
If you haven’t registered yet and want to take part, there’s still time to brew something before the Sept. 14th drop off deadline. Register here!
2024-2025 Season Calendar
We’ve tentatively nailed down all the monthly meeting topics for the upcoming season. The Calendar of Events page has been updated. Note that these are subject to change as we iron out the details of each meeting and event. Also, this calendar is not an exhaustive list. We can still plan some ancillary events or field trips, depending on opportunity and level of interest. Some ideas: visit Prairie Gem Hops, field trip to Scythe or Dakotah, group brewing experiment, taproom crawl, etc. If you have any ideas or are willing to spearhead a “side quest” of some sort, please let the club executive know!
Memberships
A reminder that membership terms are 1-year long. If you haven’t set your membership to an auto-renewing subscription, then please remember to take some time to review your membership and take care of any pending renewals before they expire. You can manage your membership / subscription on the Account page under the Member Area of the website.
See you all in September!
Cheers!
Dan Molinski
Summer Updates: Big Brew, CMBTC Competition & More
Good morning Brew Bombers! We have some updates for you regarding the Big Brew, CMBTC Competition, and more!
This is just a summary, see your email for full details. If you haven’t been getting club emails, see #4 below.
1. Executives
Marc has transitioned everything to me and I’ve effectively taken over the President role. Thanks to all who voted for me. I look forward to making the upcoming season a great one for all of you.
Marc is still involved until the Big Brew and CMBTC competitions.
The Secretary role has been filled by Ryan Gren. Congratulations Ryan!
2. Big Brew at Nonsuch
Please sign up Before Friday as we need to give a final number to Nonsuch so they can order the ingredients. If you don’t remember if you signed up already or not, just sign up again and we’ll remove duplicates. This is an event for active, paid members.
https://forms.gle/mmDRyTFK889jPjW9A
3. CMBTC Competition
Registration is open!
https://beerawardsplatform.com/2024-cmbtc-brew-bombers-competition
As with the Big Brew, this is a special event for active, paid members.
4. Emails
I’ve been hearing that some folks aren’t getting the all-member emails. If you know of anyone affected, please report to the president email directly.
5. Social Media
I encourage you all to tag the club on your posts. If you’re not on social media, but want to help the club, send me some pictures of your beer, brewing, and related stuff and we can highlight it on the club accounts! This isn’t a club without it’s members so we should try to highlight you a lot more.
That’s all for now!
Cheers!
Dan Molinski
Election Results, Big Brew, CMBTC competition
Thank you to those who took the time to vote in the recent election. 47% voter turn out is not great, but it’s what we got.
Daniel Molinski won the presidency. Over the summer, I will be helping with the transition and wrapping up some projects I started, and he will take over officially in Sept (possibly sooner).
Tyler Shipman won the VP position, and Paul Mailhot held on to the uncontested role of Treasurer.
The position of Secretary is still open. If you are interested, please send an email the club executive and we will have a run off vote to fill the spot.
Big Brew
The Big Brew at Nonsuch will happen on Sunday July 28th.
It will be an early day (7am-1:30pm). There will be someone working the taproom, able to serve beer, but the kitchen will be closed, so we could do a potluck style lunch, and people are free to order delivery as well. There will be more communication on that soon.
The Big Brew beer will be available at The Common in September, as well as at Nonsuch for a release party.
Now that we have a date set, we need to know how many people will be committing to coming, and we need to collect fees for the event. The following link will be a sign-up for people committing to attending.
Big Brew Sign Up < Please sign up again even if you’ve filled in previous forms for the big brew.
Note that this is a paid-members-only event. Free-tier members are not eligible to participate
CMBTC Brew Competition
I’m excited to announce that CMBTC has offered to run a competition for the Club. They will be donating some malt to be used in brews done over the summer, with a submission deadline of September 14th. They will be judging and announcing the winners at the October meeting (which, if all goes as planned, will be at CMBTC).
The CMBTC malt will be available at Grain To Glass. When each person who commits to brewing for the competition gets ingredients for their brew, they will be given some base malt, but there will be no other rules beyond using the malt as a main component (>50%) of the recipe. Style is up to you – smaller batches may be necessary for higher gravity beers. Specialty malt, hops, and yeast will be up to you.
We will need you to sign up for this so that the amount of malt provided to each individual can be determined. If only a handful commit, each get a lot, but if there are many entrants, the amount of malt will be less.
Prizes will include a chance to brew a big batch at CMBTC and have your beer served at their December Open House. Also possibly free malt for a year.
We will need each person submitting a beer to include the style and any relevant notes regarding ingredients and adjuncts for the judges.
Oxus will be the drop off point, with a deadline of September 14th. We will keep the beer in the cooler to maintain freshness.
Cheers,
Marc
2024-2025 Club Election
Registered club members can vote now! Voting is open until Friday June 14th at midnight.
Log in to review the candidates and cast your votes.
Windup Potluck & Info
Howdy Brew Bombers,
It’s that time of year where we wrap up the season with a Windup BBQ. Please check your emails for the link to sign-up for the potluck.
Hot dogs and burgers are on the menu with the club supplying plates, napkins and utensils as well as buns and basic condiments. Feel free to bring other more exotic condiments.
The Windup itself is taking place at Half Pints Brewing on Saturday June 8th (there will be no meeting on Tuesday June 4th!). Windup festivities will begin once Half Pints closes at 6pm but feel free to arrive early to support them by enjoying a taproom beverage.
Bring any outdoor games for the competition and merriment.
The club will also be purchasing a keg for members to enjoy as we can’t have any home brew at this event – though you may bring bottles to share/exchange with others as long as they remain unopened.
Rain or shine. BYO Chair.
Thanks,
Your Brew Bombers Executive