Happy Thanksgiving, Baltibrewers!
Here's hoping you all get to spend your day with family, friends, and someone you love. We're truly thankful to have such a great cast of brewers involved with our club, and we look forward to brewing better, bigger, and badder beers with each of you.
What are you drinking with your Thanksgiving dinner? Let us know!
Remember that the Guild Holiday Party is a week from Saturday. Tickets are still available, and we hope you'll help us represent Baltibrew again this year at Heavy Seas Brewery. We're also doing a bit of holiday fun at our upcoming December 19th meeting at Nepenthe. We'll limit club business to 2014 officer elections, dues payment, and the January collective brew day. Hope to see you there.
Last night we had a small meeting but were able to accomplish quite a bit. However, we need everyone's feedback on the September Brew to be able to move forward.
Let's assume we are going with the Willy Wonka theme, everyone seems to like that idea and is on board. Our next brew will focus on making beer for the Christmas Party, centered around this theme. The idea is to have 3-4 recipes going at once at the next brew (smaller batches of course) and have them each be chocolate based. Each recipe would do something different with the chocolate/willy-wonka theme. Some of the ideas we threw around were Chocolate-Orange, A Salty Chocolate Gose, a Chocolate Cherry and a lighter Chocolate (white chocolate?) beer that is dyed Purple.
Everyone can submit recipes in the comments below and then we can all vote on them. The top 3 will be the brewmasters for that beer (or will at least be in charge of delegating the brew to someone else). On brew day we will split up into teams for each recipe.
Besides the chocolate based recipes, we thought it would also be interesting to have one more experimental recipe that would be the" Oompa Loompa beer". This could be more bizarre than the others, so feel free to submit your ideas for that as well.
Here are the current September Brew Details.
When: Sat. 9/22/2012
Where: Ian's Place
What: 3 Chocolate Based Beers
1 Experimental Oompa Loompa beer
Submit recipes and general comments below. We should decide on the recipe's within the next two weeks, so get them in ASAP so we can start the voting process.
Pics coming soon, but just so you know, we won the Guild Holiday Party Club Hour Competition, and our club name takes its place on the "door prize." The cohesiveness of our Nightmare Before Christmas theme beat out our fierce competition.
We did a great job this year, and let's do our best to keep it up for next year.
Happy pre-Thanksgiving, Baltibrewers!
Lots to discuss:
Hope you're having a great run-up to the holidays, and hope you get to drink some great beers with your Thanksgiving meal.
Guild Holiday Party Tickets go on sale tomorrow at 9a.m. DO NOT sleep on buying them, as this ALWAYS sells out fast. More details about the charities involved can be found on the guild site linked in the last sentence. We really want to have a heavy presence at this event. Baltibrew is the fastest growing club in the state, the youngest on average, and — we think — the most diverse. Let's show the rest of the clubs what we're all about.
Minutes from last Thursday's meeting are after the jump. As noted at the meeting, please read these here. They're posted to the website specifically so we don't have to re-hash all aspects of old business from the previous meeting. This saves us time, and gets us down to the ACTUAL business at hand of drinking, sharing, and discussing homebrew.
In addition to the link to minutes, if you won't take my word for how fun the Guild Holiday Party is, I've included a more thorough description.
Seems appropriate that we'll be brewing a Nightmare Before Christmas ale on the day before Halloween. The current iteration of the recipe is fairly interesting — without giving too much away, think off-kilter Xmas cookies.
We're only brewing 10 gallons, so there will not be any available for club purchase. If you have your own rig, feel free to do your own brew.
Brew day starts early as usual, bring food, beer to share, chairs, etc. We're meeting at Josh's place to get started at 9 in the a.m. Check the phone list if you need to get a hold of Josh by phone.
We have a tie, so now we'll have another vote.
We brew on the 30th at Josh Rosen's house, so we'll need to have this locked up tight by Friday in order to formulate a recipe, and pick up ingredients.
Which theme should we run with for the Guild Holiday Party?
Total Voters: 19
Picnic time swiftly approaches, but not so swiftly that we can't brew a beer especially for this event.
As noted in the previous post, there is a wheat beer competition the day of the picnic, and apparently there are CASH PRIZES.The comp is BJCP judged, but not sanctioned; sorry, no points. That said, if you are taking the BJCP course, this is an excellent opportunity for you to get some off the grid tasting/judging experience.
This is a kid friendly/family friendly event, so please bring out significant others, and/or offspring.
I expect that I'll brew something this weekend — probably Sunday — for this event specifically. Not sure exactly what, but I may do two different ten gallon batches.
I want to reiterate that this event is one of the Guild's bigger parties, and having as many Baltibrewers in attendance as possible is pretty important. We owe the Guild big ups for hooking all of our dues paying members up with our discount at the participating homebrew shops, and promoting homebrewing throughout the state in such an effective way.
If you haven't been to Patapsco Valley State Park, it's even more reason to attend. It's a beautiful park, not far from the City, and it's always a good time. The picnic is held in the Hollofield Area off Rt. 40 at Shelter 300, and you should bring food and beer as the event is basically one big potluck picnic. The shelter features a massive grill, so bring grillables if that's your thing.
I will probably send my beer(s) over by car with a friend or the wife, as I intend to bike out to the park which also features some pretty awesome trails — get some ride in between rounds of judging.
Hope to see a lot of you out there!
Baltibrewers:
Got the official word that Guild Holiday Party Tickets are ON SALE NOW. Buy them here: http://www.mdhomebrewers.org/holiday
Tickets are only available online, cost $25, and proceeds go to charity.
If you are interested in going, get on this ASAP. Tickets ALWAYS sell out.
Our theme for "Club Hour" is "Griswold Family Christmas." We have a subcommittee that should get going soon to help get this in order. Individual emails about this will go out on Monday-ish.
Further details about the party after the jump.
Hey folks,
Details on the 2009 Free State Homebrewers' Guild Holiday Party are below.
Get on this now, as tickets tend to go quick.
Holiday party is always great, and this year's will be a great opportunity for our club to make a big splash, hopefully with a win in the annual Hedonistic Homebrew Competition with our Ginger Snap Ale entry. The Indian/Middle Eastern theme should be pretty impressive. The party is a chance for our club to mingle with the other clubs in the state, so please consider checking it out.
Ticket costs help pay for the food, and other incidentals.
Hope to see you there. The following is reprint of an email by Les White, the guild president:
Hi Fellow Homebrewers and Friends,We're just over a month away from the Guild Holiday Party. The date is Saturday, December 5th. Once again, Hugh Sisson and crew have opened up Clipper City Brewing to host our party. We thank them and all homebrew shops, breweries, pubs, restaurants and private donors who graciously give to this, our largest charity fundraising event of the year.Details, details, details....
- Date: Dec. 5th, 2009
- Time: 6-10pm
- Place: Clipper City Brewing
- Menu: Indian/Middle Eastern
- Tickets: $25 in advance
This event is limited and will sell out. Tickets are Only available ONLINE at:We're still working out some details on this year's charities so check on the above page closer to the party for more information.