Category: Big Brew

Club Updates & December Meeting

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Hello Brew Bombers!

The next club meeting is Tuesday December 3rd at Devil May Care and we’ll be doing Homebrew “Show & Tell”, so bring a piece of homebrew equipment you’d like to show off.  It can be almost anything… something you consider critical that you never brew without, or something unique and interesting, something homemade/DIY, or something expensive to make others jealous, ha ha.  We’ll also be doing a bit of beer trivia just for fun.

Homebrew Feedback

We have a new process for getting feedback on your homebrews.  In short, you bring your bottled beer samples and prepared feedback sheets to a club meeting, other members take them home to evaluate, and they give their feedback directly back to you.  There’s a new page on the website with all the details.  You can navigate there by looking under the “Members Area” menu > Homebrew Feedback

Pro/Am Brew Challenge

The Pro/Am is done!  Congratulations to the following winners from our club:

  • James Ediger got 1st with his Altbier
  • Jonathan Schneider, got 1st with his Blonde Ale
  • Steve Shaw got 1st with his Peanut Butter Porter, 3rd with his Fruit Beer, 3rd with his Mixed Style Beer
  • Thomas Cooper got 3rd with his SHV Mead

The points accumulated for the club should be pushing us up to 6th place in the BOTY circuit, which is the best position we’ve ever been in! 

Dave and Steph will not be continuing in their roles so they’re looking for next year’s organizers to take over!  If you’re interested, reach out to them!

  • Competition Director: Responsible for recruiting/managing judges, BJCP registration, LGCA Permit, Budget, Big picture stuff.
  • Competition Coordinator: Responsible for recruiting volunteers/stewards, marketing, sponsorships, prize donations, etc.

Tap Handles

Most of you have gotten your tap handles from me already.  Those who haven’t can pick them up from Steve Shaw.  Big shout out to club Secretary, Ryan Gren for the idea! It was a big success and the tap handles look pretty sweet. If there’s enough interest, maybe we can do another round with a new design next season.

Creative Competition

This will take place at Torque Brewing on Monday January 13th, so this is a reminder to members to get your brews going sooner rather than later.  This year’s creative competition is all Spice, Herb, Vegetable Beers.

Big Brew 2025

We have a host! This season’s Big Brew event will be taking place at Trans Canada Brewing sometime in March.  Specific details are still being worked out, but as usual, the winner of the creative comp gets to work with the brewery on the recipe for the big brew.

Cheers,
Dan Molinski

Summer Updates: Big Brew, CMBTC Competition & More

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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

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

Big Brew – March 17th 2019

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Hey Everyone,

For those that may not have been receiving the emails, the Big Brew is this Sunday March 17th and we still have some spots available. If you wish to attend please send me an email ASAP.

Here are some event details:

  • The event will start at 10 AM at Oxus brewing at 1180 Sanford St.
  • We’re doing a Pot-Luck, so bring a food item.
  • We are doing work so wear clothes you don’t mind getting dirty.
  • The floors have an anti-slip coating but can still be slippery when wet. Please wear appropriate footwear with decent grip.
  • Bring a chair. There aren’t many chairs in the building, so if you don’t bring one you may be standing.
  • Bring a CLEAN carboy. We will have a sanitation station (starsan) setup, but you need to make sure it’s cleaned first.
    • If you bring a glass carboy make sure to bring a milk crate (or something similar) to transport it. Glass carboy on a cement floor isn’t a good plan.
  • In the event we have more wort than carboys you may want to bring a second carboy just in case.
  • Yeast will be pitched at home, not at the brewery.
    • Recommended yeast for this recipe is: Wyeast Labs #1968 (London ESB Ale).
    • This isn’t provided, and the choice of yeast is up to you.
  • Payment for the event will be collected at the event.

Here are some of the jobs / stations, at the start of the event we’ll organize people to the various jobs. Think about which one you want to be part of.

  • Mashing in / water chemistry
  • Vorlauf
  • Transfer to boil kettle
  • Empty and clean the mash tun
  • Boil station
  • Whirlpool
  • Knockout (chilling via the heat exchanger)
  • Boil kettle cleanup
  • Oxygenate the wort
  • Carboy sanitization
  • Carboy filling
  • General cleanup

Sean Richens will have a couple of informative presentations with a slideshows during the day.

Sean S will have a NEIPA (I believe) on tap for us 🙂

This should be a fun day of brewing, learning and hanging out with some really cool people. 🙂

Cheers,

Sean.

Big Brew 2019

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Hey Everyone,

It’s hard to believe there’s only 4 meetings left in the season! It feels like it’s been flying by. March is here and with it comes the Big Brew.

Traditionally the Big Brew has always (to my knowledge) been held at Half Pints. Half Pints has been a gracious host to the club over the years and I want to personally thank them for what they’ve done for us through the years. However, due to logistical reasons (occupancy limit and space issues) we have to look elsewhere. Just in case some have been wondering why we haven’t met there (except for the first meeting of the year) lately. We’ve simply grown too big and we don’t want to cause them any issues. I’ve been talking with Sean S (yep. there’s a lot of us) at Oxus Brewing Co. and he’s going to be hosting us this year. We’re booked in for St. Patrick’s Day (March 17th). Sean himself (as some of you know) was a former member of the club and has been eager to give back

The only catch is that we can only do 500 L at a time. Rather than do a double batch in one day (a very long day) he’s going to run a 500 L batch the day before and store it at 0 C for us, then we can just focus on the one 500 L batch.

The estimated cost for attending the Big Brew is $25, but we’ll have to see what the cost of the ingredients will end up at. Also the event is open to any Winnipeg Brew Bombers member that has paid for their 2018/2019 membership. If you haven’t paid yet but would like to enter there’s still time to pay the dues (you can send an email to treasurer@winnipegbrewbombers.ca). Also note that in the cost of the membership you get a steak at the end of year BBQ. 🙂

There’s also limited space so we’re limited to 50 spots. If you would like to attend please RSVP to myself ASAP.

The choice for this year’s Big Brew has been narrowed down to three styles. If you’re planning to attend you can vote on the style you wish to do here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/JTVXG8V

I’ll leave the vote open until the end of the week (Sunday).

More details will be provided as we get closer to the date.

Big Brew Announced – Sunday March 13th 2016

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This years Big Brew will be held Sunday March 13th. Your IPA competition winner, Myles, has selected a fine German Altbier to brew!

7B. Altbier
A well balanced, well attenuated, bitter yet malty, clean, and smooth, amber to copper colored German beer. The bitterness is balanced by the malt richness, but the malt intensity and character can range from moderate to high (the bitterness increases with the malt richness).

As always, this will be held at Half Pints brewery, usually running about 9am – 4pm. Your brew master Dave Rudge has lined up some presentation with members of the Manitoba Brewer’s Association, these should be quite informative!

* This is a members only event

Big Brew style of 2013 announced.

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Our February Malt forward competition had eight entries and they were all well-crafted brews that were enjoyed by our members.  The winners of the competition were:

3rd place: Ken Yost for his Barley Wine.

2nd place: Mark Borowski for his Russian Imperial Stout

1st place: Jared Carlberg for his Eisbock

Special thanks to Nathan, Sean, Roger, Chris, and Bob for entering your beverages.  They were all very tasty beers.

Since Jared won the competition, he had the opportunity to choose the big brew of 2013.  After some deliberation, he decided that the Winnipeg Brew Bombers will be making a Dunkelweizen at Half Pints Brewing Co.

As soon as we have the costs broken down, we will let you know how much 23 liters of wort will cost each member.  Payment will be accepted at our March 5th meeting. Unfortunately, we will only be able to fill about 43 carboys so it will be on a first pay, first served basis.

 

 

March Big Brew

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Half Pints Brewing Company is once again allowing us to brew a batch of wort on their Premises.  The date of the Big Brew is March 17th starting at about 9 AM (exact time to be confirmed later).

You will be allowed to fill up one 23 liter carboy or bucket (Cost of wort TBD)

You must be a paid member in good standing.

You will be responsible for adding the yeast to your fermentor at home. You have free reign to use any yeast you want.

Due to a couple hiccups last year, we will check, clean, and sanitize your fermentors on site to make sure they will not pass on any bacteria to other carboys.

This year, we will give you the opportunity to vote for what beer style you want to brew.

 

  Update: January 11, 2013 – Since we do not have 51 members of the Winnipeg Brew Bombers, it looks like someone(s)took into their hands to skew the results. As the president, I am making an executive decision:  “The Irish Red and the Wheat Beer are tied at 16 votes each and the winner of the Malt Forward competition in February will choose the beer style to be brewed.”