National Teach a Friend to Homebrew Day

Fellow Brewing Missionaries-- As you may know, Saturday, November 6 marks the day known as the American Homebrewers Association's National Teach A Friend To Homebrew Day. The MN Homebrewers club will celebrate the occasion with an informative brewing party. The extract brewing demonstrations begin each hour, on the hour, from the time the first hops are dropped in at 10:00 A.M. until the final stove shuts off after the 2:00 batch. The place is the patio at Barley John's Brewpub, located at Old Highway 8 @ County Road D; New Brighton, MN 55112. The phone number is 651.636.4670. Take the County Road D exit west off of 35W North, and go about two blocks. Tents will be erected in case of inclement weather. I am gently requesting a few things here-- 1) Please join us for the celebration! 2) Please bring a friend, co-worker, family member--anyone who has always seemed more than casually interested in your rather unique hobby. 3) Please consider being an instructional brewer at the event! (info below) 4) Please consider being a Mashing Mentor! (info below) On Saturday, November 6, we will have an open-house style party, during which many different versions of the same recipe will be brewed--something of a brewing experiment. We will start a batch each hour, on the hour (10:00, 11:00, 12:00, 1:00, and 2:00), so that whenever interested parties arrive, they will never be far from the start of a new demo. The recipes will all be the same (a Northern English Brown Ale--BJCP category 11C) except for the yeast. Each instructional brewer will utilize a different yeast strain. At the Christmas party, we can line up the beers and taste for differences! Please volunteer to brew and to explain the process to a small group of interested people. Besides door prizes, catalogues, and coupons (for the newbies!), I think that it would be great at this event for interested neophytes who do not know someone in the club to connect with an established brewer in a sort of mentoring program. This can be very casual, and can be as simple as giving the newbie your name and number, so that she/he can call with those questions that inevitably arise while making those first few batches. A coworker of mine just brewed his first batch, and he called me numerous times while brewing it. I was glad to help, and he was relieved to know that there was a willing mentor who loved talking him through that first batch. I think that people who are watching the demos will be more inclined to brew on their own later if they have a name and a face to associate with the hobby, and especially if they know that there is a kind and knowledgeable person they can call when the wort boils over, or when the yeast won't kick in, or when they're trying to remember if it's three-quarters CUP of priming sugar or three-quarters POUND. SO-- what we need, besides your attendance, is this-- JOIN us Saturday, November 6 at Barley John's BRING a potential brewer TELL me that you'll bring your very basic setup and brew an extract batch (with steeped specialty grains) while talking people through the steps. I'll try to get the ingredients donated, but please consider that you might need to pay for the batch that you brew (but you get to KEEP it!). TELL me that you're willing to meet, greet, and exchange digits with one of the potential brewers, so that he/she might call you with brewing questions when he/she starts brewing Please get back to me, John Longballa, at 651.292.9693, or at jlongb(a)ties2.net Help us inspire a new generation of brewers, so that handcrafted beer never goes out of style again. Thank you for your participation! John