FYI - the latest E-Newsletter from our neighbor club to the North, the Northern Ale Stars. - Al Original Message: ----------------- From: Northern Ale Stars northernalestars(a)hotmail.com Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2004 10:08:39 -0500 To: northernalestars(a)hotmail.com Subject: October E-Newsletter Hello Ale Stars, Just wanted to get out the October E-Newsletter to let you know about the exciting homebrew events coming up: October Meeting – Beer Weekend: The annual Fall Beer Weekend and Meeting at Hestons Resort and Casino will commence Thursday, October 21st with the traditional Pub Night. Pub Food (appetizers) will be the grub of the evening, for you early birds who make it up Thursday, so bring your favorite Pub Grub to munch on and share with the others. Pizzas will be the fare for the traditional Saturday evening group meal and, as mentioned before, Hestons has a new brick bread oven. Barb Gecas has graciously offered to make pizza crusts, so bring your favorite toppings and we’ll see what happens. I’m sure there will be a contest for the ugliest pizza, the craziest pizza, ect., so use your imagination (but you have to eat what you make). If you haven’t contacted Greg or Barb to let them know you’re coming, or you just realized you don't want to miss all the fun, and would like to see if the is still cabin space, you can contact them at 218-388-2243 or info(a)hestons.com November Meeting: The November NAS meeting will be Sunday, November 7th at the home of Bryn Jacobson, also the home of Boreal Bicycles. So bike on over and bring along some homebrew. The start time will be the usual 2:00PM-ish. Bryn’s address is 631 E. 8th Street in Duluth. Brewing Ingredients: As most of you know, since the closing of Lake Superior Smokin Brews, mail order was the main source of brewing ingredients for us in Northern Minnesota, especially if you are an all-grain brewer (Last Chance Liquors carries extract ingredients and yeast). Until now........ Head Brewer Dale Kleinschmidt, at Lake Superior Brewing, has graciously offered to include orders from club members for grain and hops (in bulk quantities – i.e. bags of grain, hops by the pound) with the brewery’s orders. Now granted, while you might be able to use a bag of Pale malt, you probably don’t need a whole bag of crystal 40 or chocolate malt. However, the idea has been brought up that we pool our needs and order in bulk quantities as a group, then divide the spoils ( er, that might have been a poor choice of words) once the order arrives. For example, we get 5 people who each need 20 pounds of crystal 40 and we could order a 50 pound bag. A home brewers co-op, of sorts. If you are interested in participating, let me know. We’ll get together soon to combine our needs and get our order to Dale. And speaking of Smokin Brews, don’t forget, Bill Clark (former proprietor of Lake Superior Smokin Brews) still has good quantities of specialty grains and other brewing ingredients. You can e-mail Bill at wrclark(a)smokinbrews.com (or check out his web site www.smokinbrews.com ) to see if he has something you need and would be helping Bill clear out his remaining inventory. Take it from me; he still has a lot of good stuff! Congratulations: Mike Hoops of Town Hall Brewery in Minneapolis brought home three medals from the Great American Beer Festival for his Hope and King Scotch Ale (my favorite), Thunderstorm and the just released Grand Cru. Brother Dave of Ftigers Brewhouse metaled with his Farm House Reserve. Congrats guys! Keep up the good work. Mash-Out Moves: The Upper Mississippi Mash-Out (UMM) has moved to January. The contest dates are January 27-29th, 2005. That's the weekend before the Super Bowl, so you won't miss a minute of NFL play-off action. This year the UMM will be the first contest in the High Plains Brewer of the Year circuit. New this year for the contest: -New Brewer award: a special award category just for new brewers, complete with medals and prizes, open to any style of beer, cider or mead -BJCP 2004 guidelines will be used (see below) -more award categories: we're going to try to have awards for all 28 BJCP categories, but reserve the right to collapse categories as needed -multiple mead award categories: all 3 BJCP mead categories will have awards for 1st, 2nd and 3rd -judge and steward prize drawing: there will be a separate prize drawing for all judges and stewards. -food at the awards show: no details yet, but we're working at having food at the awards show at the Summit brewery Keep checking the web site for details: http://mnbrewers.com/mashout 2004 REVISION TO THE BJCP STYLE GUIDELINES NOW ONLINE The Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) recently released the 2004 revision of the beer styles that are used by almost all homebrew competitions. http://www.bjcp.org/styles04/ The last time the beer style guidelines were updated was in 1999, with a minor revision in 2001. Since then several new styles have appeared in the market, and several old styles have been re-discovered by homebrewers. The 2004 revision of the style guidelines reflect these new/rediscovered styles. There have also been some deletions from the 1999 style guidelines, namely Traditional Mead and Varietal Mead. These have been re-defined by the Sweet, Semi-Sweet and Dry Mead categories in the new guidelines. Also, the former Light/Standard Premium American Lager category has been re-defined by breaking each of the three into it's own sub-style. Where there were formerly 26 styles and 81 sub-styles, the 2004 guidelines delineate 28 styles and 99 sub-styles. Taking into account the three styles that were deleted, that means a total of 18 new sub-styles are defined in the new guidelines. The new styles are listed below. NEW STYLES IN THE 2004 BJCP STYLE GUIDELINES # LTR CATEGORY SUB-CATEGORY 1 A Light Lager Lite American Lager 1 B Light Lager Standard American Lager 1 C Light Lager Premium American Lager 9 D Scottish and Irish Ale Irish Red Ale 12 C Porter Baltic Porter 13 E Stout American Stout 14 B India Pale Ale American IPA 14 C India Pale Ale Imperial IPA 15 D German Wheat & Rye Beer Roggenbier (German Rye Beer) 18 A Belgian Strong Ale Belgian Blond Ale 21 B Spice/Herb/Veg Beer Christmas/Winter Specialty Spiced Beer 22 C Smoke-Flav. & Wood Aged Wood-Aged Beer 24 A Traditional Mead Dry Mead 24 B Traditional Mead Semi-Sweet Mead 24 C Traditional Mead Sweet Mead 27 B Standard Cider and Perry English Cider 27 C Standard Cider and Perry French Cider 27 D Standard Cider and Perry Common Perry 27 E Standard Cider and Perry Traditional Perry 28 B Specialty Cider and Perry Fruit Cider 28 C Specialty Cider and Perry Apple Wine 1999 BJCP STYLES THAT HAVE CHANGED OR ARE GONE # LTR CATEGORY SUB-CATEGORY 1 A American Lager Light/Standard/Premium 25 A Mead Traditional Mead 25 B Mead Varietal Honey Trad.Mead The new guidelines are online at: http://www.bjcp.org/styles04/ Even if you have no intention of brewing any of the new styles, it is worth your time to read the new guidelines. There have been changes to the existing styles as well - mostly subtle, but sometimes subtle is the difference between a good beer and a great beer. The new guidelines are officially set to replace the old guidelines on January 1, 2005, although there are a few competitions that have already switched to the new guidelines. To avoid confusion (or perhaps to maximize it...), the authors have gone out of their way to make sure that the style numbers and letters that were paired with the styles in the old guidelines are all different with the new guidelines. The old guidelines will be preserved on the BJCP Website, in a special archive section for historical purposes. The new guidelines will be covered in the Winter 2005 BJCP class sponsored by the Minnesota Home Brewers Assoc., one of the homebrew clubs in the cities. Now is a great time to take the BJCP class to learn these new styles, or to re-take the class to get a primer on them. The Winter 2005 BJCP class is being organized by Jonathan Crist, and will be starting January 6, 2005. You can contact Jonathan at cristj(a)bsci.com. Cheers! Steve Daiken Secretary northernalestars(a)hotmail.com _________________________________________________________________ Is your PC infected? Get a FREE online computer virus scan from McAfee® Security. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963 -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ .