April Meeting Recap

Q: How many brewers can you fit in a 2 car garage?
A: Way more than you would think!!!

I am happy to say that our April meeting was a big success and a lot of fun. So far our bi-monthly educational meetings have been hugely popular and we had around 40 brewers show up! For many of those it was their first LDB meeting!

Club updates:
Mountain Brewers fest: We are still looking for members that would like to donate 5 or more gallons of their home brew for the Mountain Brewers fest. If you would like to pour we will be rotating people in and out of the booth. Even if you can’t make it to the festival, please consider sending some of your beer up with someone else.

Club Jockey box: With the upcoming brew fest we proposed building a Jockey box to be mostly funded with club dues. It was a very informal vote, but it was a resounding yes to move forward with it. The box will always be available to club members for personal use on a first come first serve basis.

Epic Brewing/Annex Collaboration: At the end of March, 10 LDB beers were submitted to Epic. A tasting panel made of Epic Brewers tasted all the beers and narrowed it down to two beers. Those beers were the Honey wheat Hibiscus from Team #2 [Vince Stuart, Allen Maschek, Cody McKendrick, Arron Smith, Ryan Buxton, Chance Davis, and Mark Olivares]
and the Brux Trois Citra Pale Ale from Team #1 [Troy Cloward, Andrew Ayers, Mike Mirabella, Ross Metzger, Clay Turnbow, and Michael Pezely] 

It was a difficult choice between these two but Head Brewer Kevin Crompton picked the hibiscus beer as his favorite. The only problem is that this beer will take more time to brew as it has a non-beer ingredient and has to be submitted to the TTB for approvals. That can take up to 90 days. So with that the Brux pale will be the beer brewed for the collaboration. We hope to have some more details in the coming days on when the brew day will happen. Members will be invited down to the Annex when they do decide to brew it.

A big thanks goes out to Ryan Buxton for getting the collaboration going. This was a really fun event for everyone involved. Almost all of the beers got very good feedback, and that is not an easy task. These were all 4% beers brewed from limited ingredients, on a tight timeline, and because of the collaboration within each team, these were the first time these beers were brewed. Great job everyone!

Education topic recap: On Sunday we had Andrew Ayers present on yeast starters, rinsing, storage, and collection. It was a great topic and even better presentation that included a demo of yeast washing. Andrew even grew up 6 or 7 limited release yeast strains and handed them out at the end of the talk. 

Andrew also announced that he recently won the Peak-to-peak Pro-Am competition in Longmont, Colorado. His prize will be brewing his winning beer, a Jalapeño Cream ale, for the GABF Pro-Am with Left Hand brewing! Legendary!

For those interested, here is a link to the Yeast presentation.