September Meeting Notes - Bridger Brew Crew

[erogers427]

Hey homebrewers,

Hope you are planning your autumn beers, it'll be coming up quick! Personally, I have an amber Bière de Garde in the works that I'm really looking forward to.

Big thanks to Jac and Travis Miller for hosting this month's club meeting. We had a fair bit of business to discuss and of course plenty of homebrew and some commercial beers to sample.

Thanks also go out to Jake at Crooked Yard Hops for giving the club a tour of the farm this past month. It was a great opportunity to learn all about hops from start to finish. We homebrewers usually only get to see them in their final pelletized form in their little foil packs. It was a few weeks before harvest so the plants were full size and it was quite the sight to see. At the farm, they also have everything needed to separate the hop cones from the bines, dry them, pelletize them and package them. It's great to have such an opportunity so close to home.

In August we also were at one of Bozeman Brewing's Sunday FUNDays. These fundraising opportunities help support the club and our events. In addition, we did a small raffle that day to boost our fundraise.

At our next monthly meeting in October, we will be doing a Saison style tasting. This is a follow up to the group brew day we did at Ryan's house back in July. We'll taste the Saison we brewed that day, along with other commercial and homebrew examples. This kind of side-by-side tasting helps us as homebrewers to better understand the similarities and the differences among a single style and give us ideas of what we might want to brew.

On October 14th, the Brew Crew will have a booth at the Fresh Hop Festival at the fairgrounds. We're planning on having some examples of homebrew equipment on display and just spreading the joy of homebrewing to all that stop by.

Coming up in November will be the club's off-flavor tasting. At this event we dose beers with samples of the various off flavors that can be produced during the brewing, fermenting, or storage. While it seems like a weird thing to do, it is actually quite educational. It helps us to train our palates to detect and identify these flavors. And if, in the future, you identify one of these flavors in your own homebrew, it usually points to a specific part of your process that is going wrong.

Beyond that, in December, we are planning to combine the monthly meeting with the holiday party. This also includes the drawing for iron brewer, where everyone participating throws an ingredient name into a hat, then draw the ingredient they'll need to brew with for a tasting sometime next year.

Also with the end of the year coming up, that means club officer elections as well. All officer positions are up for nomination and include: President, Vice President, VP of Membership and Media, Treasurer, Secretary, and Member-at-large.

In other beer news, the Montana Brewers Fall Rendezvous is coming up on September 29th in Missoula.

Cheers,

Evan

Bridger Brew Crew

https://www.bridgerbrewcrew.org