February 2023 - Meeting Minutes

GOAT Lab Brewing, Lowell

Meeting called to order by James with a toast by our President Larry (via Lewie or Social Chair) "Here's to a long life and a merry one. A quick death and an easy one. A pretty girl and an honest one. A cold beer, and another one!"

Education Piece: Two Perspectives on How to Build Recipes

Patrick and James teamed up this month to present two different viewpoints on how to build recipes. Patrick explained the pros and cons of building recipes by hand using excel spreadsheets, while James showed an easier path using a brewing software called Brewfather. The general consensus was that neither approach is wrong and as long as we are making quality beer consistently, then go for what you know! Link to Brewfather if you would like to try it out.

Old Business:

Iron Brewer 4th Quarter 2022 was hosted by OZ at GOAT Lab Brewing on January 3rd. The style was Dopplebock.

Results:

Randy Germann
Patrick Bohannon
Keith Linn

Next up for Iron Brewer will be Q1 - Hazy IPA

Annual membership dues are due now! Please see our Treasurer Keola Ingerson. Dues are $25 and may be paid in person via cash or check, and may also be paid online with a small processing fee.

New Business:

We reviewed last year's brewer of the month/year program and made some updates which can be found HERE!

The goals we wanted to achieve with the program this year are as follows:

Continue to add value to meetings by encouraging homebrewers to bring in their homebrews
Create an easier method for calculating all of the points month to month
Increase efficiency and transparency with the current standings month to month
Encourage members to remain active at local charity events by serving homebrew

Iron Brewer was also discussed and reviewed. Proposed changes to bring to FLOPS are as follows:

Remove the North vs South format. Both clubs are small and most homebrewers are members of both non-profit clubs
Add valuable feedback in the form of BJCP judging with scoresheets. This will require the beers to be judged at a later date. In the past we have not done BJCP scoresheets in favor of a best of show style judging. The issue here is two fold.
1. Judges miss the entire meeting
2. Nobody gets any valuable feedback for their Iron Brewer Entries
OZ also proposes that the winners receive some type of prize. Possibly a gift card to North Tunnel?

Goals for 2023:

Group trip to Clarksville to tour the UofA hop farm (Lewie and/or Jason checking into this)
Community Involvement - We want to do two community service projects this year. The first one will be this Spring with the Beaver Watershed Alliance (James is working out details)
Increase membership by 25%
- Improved Monthly Newsletter
- Website Enhancements (Meeting Minutes, Community Involvement Page, Updated Events Calendar)
- Adding value to meetings by bringing in more guest speakers (Can we land John Palmer???)

Upcoming events were discussed. You can always find the most up-to-date events calendar HERE!

Bluebonnet Beers were dropped off by Larry and Randy. We were told that no beers were thrown out on the highway and that they all arrived safely!

Closing Minutes:

Dave Hartmann from Gotahold brewing will be joining is in March at New Province

Call for feedback: Dave said he could take entries to KC for the National Homebrew Comp

Identifying beers that were brought (25 total homebrews!!!)

Brewer of the month results:

Doc Farmer
Randy Germann
Larry McCallister

Motion to close