Author: brewpres

2024-25 Club Election Call for Candidates

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Club elections for next season’s exec will kick off during the season windup BBQ at Half-Pints on Saturday June 8th.  Whether you’re at the BBQ or not, please make the time to review the candidates and submit your vote (the page is only visible to registered members).

Below is a short writeup of the current exec roles, as well as an estimate of monthly time commitment outside of club meetings and events.  If you are interested, message Marc with the position you would like to run for and a brief write up about your ideas/goals for the upcoming year.

President:

Typical Activities / Responsibilities:

  • Lead meetings
  • Planning Club meeting agenda and content
  • Arrange meeting locations
  • Plan and coordinate field trips for members
  • Answer emails from Club members
  • Plan the Club Kit, organize voting, and coordinate with Grain to Glass for kit building
  • Arrange Creative Comp
  • Apply for Special Sale permit via LGCA for competitions
  • Set up BJCP connections for competitions
  • Arrange Big Brew and coordinate with host brewery for brew date, aid in selling beer produced
  • Plan and arrange Club Wind-Up party
  • Keep mailing list up-to-date
  • Monthly meetings (first Tuesday) and executive meetings (second Tuesday)
  • Attend quarterly Canadian Homebrews meetings
  • Maintain relationship with LGCA regarding sampling homebrew in meetings
  • Assist other Executive members when/where needed

Average monthly time commitment:

  • 4-7 hours excluding Club & Executive meetings

Vice President:

Typical Activities / Responsibilities:

  • Lead meetings in absence of President
  • Assist in coordinating club activities
  • Assist in planning meeting content
  • Manage merchandise 
  • Fill in for other Exec members as required

Average monthly time commitment:

  • 2 – 3 hours

Treasurer:

Typical Activities / Responsibilities:

  • Working with the Club Executive to ensure that the Club is on sound financial setting by ensuring that Club activities can be funded based on Club resources
  • Working with the Pro/Am competition committee to ensure the competition is financial self-sufficient  
  • Managing and tracking the cash flows of the Club and Competition including their respective bank accounts and payment of Club and Competition expenses. 
  • Running the monthly raffle draw including purchasing beers

Average monthly time commitment:

  • 1 – 2 hours

Secretary:

Typical Activities / Responsibilities:

  • Record keeper
  • Agendas for club meetings
  • Notes/Minutes for exec meetings
  • Track/update action items throughout the season
  • Assistant to other executives
  • Help out as required
  • Draft/send communications to members
  • Set up surveys/forms
  • Updates to the club website
  • etc.

Average monthly time commitment:

  • 3 – 6 hours

Creative Comp Results, Discount Card, and April Meeting

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Thanks to all members who attended last night’s meeting. It was a great turnout with 25 people judging and evaluating the beers. Overall there were 14 beers judged.

The winners are:

1st Place: Hazelnut Espresso Stout, brewed by Steve Couch

2nd Place: Smoothie Sour (with mango and tamarind), brewed by Steve Shaw

3rd Place: Ail Ale (cream ale with garlic), brewed by Dan Molinski

Congratulations to the winners, and great work from all the brewers who participated. If you entered a beer you’ll get your score sheets emailed to you soon. Winners will be contacted directly to determine their prize selections – which were generously provided by the guys at Grape & Grain, and Grain to Glass.

Accurate Fire & Safety Discount Cards:

The folks at Accurate Fire & Safety have partnered with the club and are providing all registered club members with a discount card that give you 20% off CO2 refills!

You need to actually show the physical card, which has your name on it, in order to get the discount. To make distribution of the cards easier, they’ll be available for pick up from Devil May Care. If your card isn’t there, or if you’re a newly registered member, please let one of the club exec’s know.

April Meeting

The next club meeting is April 2nd and will be at CMBTC, (the Canadian Malting Barley Technical Centre, at 303 Main St)

Cheers!

March Meeting, Creative Comp, Club Kits

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Hi Brewers!  We have some great updates for you!

March 5th Meeting & Creative Competition:

Our next meeting will be at Oxus. 

If you brewed something for the Supermarket Sweep, please arrive at 6:30pm with enough to go around because we have a permit! This means we will be able to sample and evaluate the beers during the meeting.  Not only that, but we’ve also registered the competition with BJCP, so if you’re pursuing points be sure to attend and participate. 
There are prizes from our fantastic local homebrew suppliers to be awarded for the top three beers – 1st place gets first choice, 2nd place gets second choice, 3rd place gets what’s left.

  • Either a 5 Gallon ball-lock keg, or a 25kg bag of Pale malt from Grape & Grain
  • $125 gift certificate from Grain to Glass
  • $75 gift certificate from Grain to Glass

The 1st place winner will also get to help craft the recipe for the Big Brew.

Club Kit

The order has been placed and should be delivered by the end of the week. Once the ingredients arrive we’ll need some some volunteers to meet up and help split everything up into the individual kits.

The recipe itself is posted and available here

April Meeting

Our April 2nd meeting will take place at the CMBTC.  It’ll be our first time there since before the pandemic, so hopefully you all can make it.

LAST CALL for Club Kits

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Hi Brewers!

We have 52 full members who are technically entitled to a club kit, but only 27 people have responded to the All-Grain vs. Extract survey.

We don’t want to order 52 kits if that means 25 of them aren’t going to be picked up.  That said, we will only be ordering kits for those members who have completed the survey, and therefore this is the last reminder before we place the order.

EDIT:
The survey is now closed. If you missed it, just let us know. We’ll be ordering few extra kits.

January/February Updates

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Hi Brewers!

We’d like to welcome Steph Barten as the new Pro/Am Coordinator! Thanks for stepping up, Steph! She’ll be working alongside Dave Cole. They’ve already got the 2024 competition site up on Beer Awards Platform!
An important note for everyone is that the Pro/Am is back to being operated at arms-length from the club, so going forward any inquiries regarding the competition should now be directed to proambrewchallenge@gmail.com rather than the WBB executives.

For the Supermarket Sweep creative competition, we’ve decided to shift it to March. A number of people have said that an extra month would help them get their beer ready. We have some cool prizes for the comp: Grain to Glass has graciously donated two gift cards ($125 and $75), and Grape and Grain has offered either a new corny keg or a bag of grain. First place gets first pick, second chooses second, etc. The 1st place winner will also get to work with the Exec and the brewery involved in the Big Brew to make a recipe for the Big Brew. So, hopefully this pushes more of you to get something in the works for March 5th. We’re still working on getting us a permit for judging the creative competition.

An update on the club kit! Big thank you Scott Parker for sharing his Dark Mild recipe. As a reminder to everyone if you want to receive a club kit, take a couple minutes to confirm your membership is paid and up to date.

Just so everyone is aware, these are the things currently up the planning pipeline.

  1. CMBTC Visit – hopefully March/April-ish.
  2. Big Brew – in talks with Nonsuch. There will likely be additional cost for members who want to participate.

Usual reminders:

Club Merch – the product listings have been updated, check it out!
Anonymous member feedback – share ideas / comments / concerns about the club.
New Facebook Group – interact with members there, because emails can be annoying.

“Now Hiring” Pro/Am 2024 Coordinator

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Planning for the 2024 Pro/Am Brew Challenge is already under way, however the Winnipeg Brew Bombers require a volunteer to step up and fill the role of Competition Coordinator.

This person will:

  • Work alongside the Competition Director
  • Be responsible for procuring sponsors and prizes
  • Handle competition marketing – social media posts, advertising the competition
  • Solicit beer submissions from professional breweries
  • LGCA Permit application
  • Arranging judging venue, awards venue
  • Planning judge/steward meals

While someone with experience is preferred, don’t let it deter you from putting your name in the hat. This is a great opportunity to learn as you go, with the support of the Competition Director and the WBB club executives. If you’re working on your BJCP certification this is a good way to earn non-judging points as well.

If you’re interested, send an email to executive@winnipegbrewbombers.ca

December Meeting, and Pro/Am Awards

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Hi Brewers!

Yes there is a meeting tomorrow. 7pm at Oxus. There’s no presentation, speaker, or topic, but we’ll be sharing a lot of updates, so we hope to see you there. If you can’t make it, updates will be posted on the website after the meeting.

The Pro/Am Award Ceremony will be hosted by Fionn MacCool’s at Grant Park this year. It’ll take place this Wednesday December 6th at 7pm. We also plan to try live-streaming the awards… likely via the proambrewchallenge Instagram account, but if that proves to be a challenge, we may just provide a Google Meet link. Keep an eye on our social channels for that.

Cheers,

Dan,
Secretary

A few things…

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Hey gang!

  • Our October meeting will be this coming Tuesday October 3rd at Oxus. We will discuss the styles for the Club Kit, and go over some basics about the malting process, which leads us to…
  • A tour at Scythe Malting is in the works. October 28th works for them. I will create a poll to see how many from the Club can attend, and then we can arrange transportation.
  • The ProAm registration is still open, entries are rolling in. Hoping to see a good representation from the Brew Bombers this year. Head to https://proam.beer to sign up.
  • The Ukrainian Hops project brew day went fairly smoothly. Thanks to everyone who was able to help out. The beer has been dry-hopped, and I’m planning to transfer it to kegs in a few days. Sean Ali has offered to bring his Cannular system in to help with the packaging.
  • Regarding homebrew sampling: we will have a Club sampling night at Oxus as part of the ProAm on Nov 7th (the dates line up with our November meeting.) There will be scoresheets available for judging. Please plan to bring one or two brews for judging. Beyond that, I have a plan for approaching some higher level authorities at the LGCA, and a letter is being drafted to request a meeting with them.
  • As far as the Cereal Bowl beer, I was planning the Oxus cereal beer and figured I’d try to be productive with my time and brew a couple batches at once. I brewed it on Wednesday last week, hoping it will be ready for Oct 6th. It was a very last minute idea. I used grain I had in my personal inventory, some yeast Sean gave me, and some hops for bittering from the Ukrainian Hops project.

See ya on Tuesday!

Cheers,

Marc

September Meeting Recap

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Hey gang,

Some notes from the meeting:

1) First, the bad news: I have not been able to secure permission from the LGCA for us to host homebrew sampling at Club meetings. A couple ideas were put forward and I will be investigating those avenues. Again, for now, we are still unable to do samplings during meetings.

2) There are a few locations I would like the Club to visit for field trips in the near future: Dacotah Malting and Scythe Malting. Both are located to the west of the city. It will probably be easiest if we go on a Saturday, considering the time needed for tours plus the commute.
It would also be cool to check out Prairie Gem Hops and Prairie Mountain Hops. Again, they are in high season, so I hope to hear back from them soon.
The other place I proposed a trip to is the Canadian Malted Barley Testing Centre. CMBTC is located at Portage and Main, and would not require much of a commute, so we could meet there. They have hosted us before, and it’s a very interesting facility. 

3) The Club Kit recipe will need to be discussed soon. Next month we will take suggestions, and it will be put to a vote online so that all paid members can have their say. You can find the past recipes on our website.

4) Our first Club Creative Competition will be a Supermarket Sweep. Rough plan is to do a very simple base of pale 2-row, with each member being allowed yeast at a local homebrew store, and flavouring adjuncts at a local grocery store. We will break into groups to judge each entry (this will hopefully be figured out soon, along with sampling in general). Feedback will be given for all entries. No dates have been decided for this yet, but start thinking about your recipe plans.

5) The Pro/Am Brew Challenge is quickly approaching. It will run November 5-9, 2023. This will be the 10th year that the competition has run, which is quite exciting. It is the only BJCP-sanctioned competition in Canada where amateurs and commercial/professional brewers compete against each other, in a battle royale style event. It is a great opportunity to see how your brews (beer, cider, and mead) stand up against everyone else’s in Canada.
The Pro/Am is a great chance for local judges to get points which go towards their BJCP rank. If you are interested in judging, check out https://www.bjcp.org

6) I’d like to start working on the planning for the Big Brew soon. For our new members, the Big Brew is where we team up with a local brewery to make a big batch of a recipe from the Club. We go to the brewery and help with the brew day, and at the end, each paid member can bring home a 20L fermenter of wort from the batch. (Yeast must be pitched at home!) You are able to then tweak the recipe as you wish, or ferment it without adjustments. In the past, the recipe chosen was the winner of a Club Creative competition. I think this is a good idea to continue with. This past year, Barn Hammer hosted us and released cans of the beer we made. It is a Smoked Wee Heavy called Slow Build and is still available if you haven’t tried it. It’s a great fall beer. Go get some!

7) On Saturday Sept 16th, we will be doing the Ukrainian Hops Experiment Brew day with Olekksi. A handful of you reached out and I will be emailing you details for that day.

8) Finally, something I forgot to mention last night is that I was recently contacted by Accurate Fire + Safety. They are looking to expand into doing more CO2 for keg systems, and have offered the Club a 20% discount on tank fills. We are trying to come up with a way to keep this exclusive to the Club and prevent it from being shared with the community/city as a whole. I am looking into getting some Club ID “coupon” cards made to give to paid members. I hope to have this arranged very soon.

9) I have changed the membership details on our site so that memberships can be renewed earlier than the calender date of when you last registered. This will help the Club get its dues in earlier in the year so we can plan for Club Kits, events, field trips, and such with a better idea idea of our finances.

10) Finally, I forgot to thank Dan for stepping up as Secretary this year. He has held the position in the past, and will be a great re-addition to the Club Executive.

Reaching the Executive is pretty easy:

Marc – president@winnipegbrewbombers.ca
Tyler – vicepresident@winnipegbrewbombers.ca
Dan – secretary@winnipegbrewbombers.ca
Paul – treasurer@winnipegbrewbombers.ca
Executive@winnipegbrewbombers.ca will reach us all.
For Club correspondence, use members@apps.winnipegbrewbombers.ca

I am also looking into changing how our Facebook group works to allow for members posts so we can have a discussion board that is less clunky than big email threads. If anybody has a better idea than FB, let me know.

I hope that wasn’t too much of a tome for you to read. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Cheers,

Marc