Big thanks to Midwest Supplies, Northern Brewer, and Brew & Grow for their kind donations for Saturday’s Teach a Friend to Homebrew Day!

Bigger thanks to Barley John’s for hosting the event! 

Biggest thanks to club members Greg Van DeMark, Brock Ray, and Chris Smith for volunteering to be demo brewers.  Each brewed identical batches of British Bitter, with one variable—the timing of the extract addition.  At the Christmas potluck you can taste if there’s any difference between boiling the extract for 60 minutes, 30 minutes, or zero minutes.

Thanks also are due to Earle Stewart for giving the technical talk about mashing techniques, and to Al Boyce for bringing all the all-grain and bottling equipment.  Many other club members pitched in at various points to make things go very smoothly, so thank you to you, and also to all the attendees!

Big thanks to Mark Glewwe and Andrew Ruggles for putting together the cider pressing event yesterday!  Mark also kindly brought tons of cider to Teach Day for those who had purchased it in advance.

Please put on your thinking caps, as it is time to find a new home for 3-4 club meetings each year.  After a long and fruitful run at the CSPS Hall in Saint Paul, they have decided to reserve Saturdays for large evening events.  It just doesn’t make sense for them to get $85 from us for 12-3 on a Saturday when it then screws up their chances of booking an $800 Saturday evening event.  They either have to pass on getting some real money for the day or ask us to change our meeting, and it just doesn’t work either way.

Soooo . . .  start looking around your neighborhoods for meeting halls, community centers, VFW’s, etc. that might be conducive to hosting club meetings.  We typically meet from 12-3, one Saturday per month from Feb.-April.  We would also perhaps use the same place for a Christmas potluck on the second Friday in December.  We need space for about 50 people, and obviously, homebrew would be brought in and consumed.  A kitchen wouldn’t hurt, and bathrooms are a must.  We could pay up to $100 per event, but probably not much more.  Someplace in Saint Paul or Minneapolis would be ideal, but first-ring suburbs wouldn’t be bad.  We just don’t want to go too far from the club’s geographic center in any direction.

The one thing would be that our reservation needs to be set in stone.  If, when contacting these places (you didn’t think that I was going to do all the leg work, now, did you?), they hedge in the least when being able to commit, then we’re better off elsewhere.  Once we set our dates, we need the space owner to honor that reservation, since we don’t want to be scrambling for a new spot at the last minute should the owner decide to give the time to another group.

So—please contact your various halls and meeting places and get back to me if a lead looks promising. 

Thanks much,
John