Hey everyone,
Hope you're enjoying this snowy day and have some dark and strong beers to crack open tonight. I've used the snow as an excuse to brainstorm ways to improve our presence on the web as well as provide a resource to brewers in NM.
When searching Google for anything related to a homebrew club in Santa Fe, our Facebook page doesn't even appear on the first five pages of results and there isn't anything pointing prospective brewers to the Sangre de Cristo Craft Brewers name. Alternatively, if you search for 'homebrew club albuquerque' the Dukes and Warthogs are the first two results.
What also became apparent during our last virtual meeting is, as a club, we individually have a huge diversity of brewing knowledge and information. Things like brewing with kveik, fermenting in a keg with a spunding valve, how to handle aging in barrels, using Tilt electronic hydrometers, etc. Trying to get that information posted as a resource for other members in the club to reference would be a great way to help expand all of our knowledge.
With all of that being said, I started tinkering with a website that should help our internet presence and act as a knowledge base. Right now it has a temporary name on wordpress, but we could get an actual domain name if this is something we want to pursue.
I have a couple categories set up that I think would be fun:
* Brewing setups - this would showcase our individual setups and how we handle our brew days / fermentation / packaging. I know my setup has changed tremendously over the last 5 years. Being able to show other members or potential brewers how our systems are set up would be helpful.
* Recipes / brew logs - this would be a reference of recipes we've brewed that turn out really well or are kinda crazy (Jim's mushroom kolsch?).
I also made a couple other pages that still need to be fleshed out (found in the footer of the site):
* A reference for growing hops in Santa Fe. I know Gunter built a badass trellis which might be neat to show off.
* Turning your spent grain from mashing into bread. I linked to some of the spent grain recipes I wrote for my bread baking website.
* A meetings / events page. Obviously not much to happen on this page right now but once COVID is behind us and we can meet again, it can be a resource for meeting information.
There's also an About Us page where we could give a little more information about when the club was founded, some of the competitions we've done, collabs with Santa Fe Brewing Co, etc.
Anyway, this email ended up a little longer than I expected. Take a look at the site and let me know if this is something you think could be helpful for the club. If you have anything you want to contribute to any of the pages, just let me know too.