Category: Big Brew

Hello Brew Bombers!

April Meeting:
Our next meeting is at Low Life Barrel House on Tuesday April 1st at 7pm.  
This meeting will be all about calibrating and using measuring devices.  We’ll be preparing solutions with known, highly accurate values that you can use to calibrate your measuring devices.  So if you have a PH meter, we’ll have containers of water at specific PH levels.  If you have refractometers, tilts, pills, etc. you can calibrate them in containers at various gravity levels.  If you have thermometers that can be calibrated, bring those too!  We’ll also be talking about using scales on your brew day.

If you plan to bring devices to the meeting, there’s a few things to remember:

• Make sure the device is charged beforehand
• If needed, bring your phone/tablet/laptop with you (also charged!)
• Label or mark your devices to avoid getting them mixed up with others

 It should be an interesting meeting, so I hope to see a lot of you there.

Club Kit:
If you haven’t picked up your club kit yet, please do that soon.  Remember, if you place an online order with Grain to Glass, you can request they deliver your kit with your order as long as you’re inside Winnipeg.

We also encourage everyone to try to finish brewing their club kits in time for the Annual General Meeting in June.  The hope is that we can do a big bottle swap that day, then spend the rest of the week evaluating each other’s Weissbier’s, and share all the feedback at the Windup BBQ the following Saturday.

Big Brew 2025:
The Big Brew at TCB is done!  Thanks to everyone who participated.  It was a long day, so extra shout out to those who stayed the whole 12 hours.  The beer will eventually be available in their tap room. Keep an eye on the club social media for details.

Pro/Am 2025:
We’re happy to share that we’ve found the new Pro/Am Director and Coordinator!  

Marc Molet-King and Adrian Zetner have both agreed to take over planning and preparations for the 2025 Pro/Am Brew Challenge. Who will have which title is still TBD… I heard talk of a beer drinking contest to find out.  

While this will be something new for Adrian, Marc has the experience of two competitions under his belt, and they’ll be joined by Kyle Dyck and Neal Foy, both of whom helped out with last year’s competition planning and are staying on the team again this year.

If you’re interested in helping out with this year’s competition as a steward, judge, volunteer or otherwise, reach out to proambrewchallenge@gmail.com

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