February Meeting
With the cold weather, we're continuing our theme of brewing beers that lend themselves to cooler fermentation. Extending last month's presentation on lagers, member Andrew VanderKlok will covering the BJCP categories European Amber Lagers and Bocks. He'll cover their history, defining characteristics and how you would brew your own version at home. We'll accompany his presentation with several club-provided commercial examples. If you have your own homebrewed versions, by all means bring them in!
Just as last month, we will be meeting at Boatyard Brewing Company at 423 E. Paterson in downtown Kalamazoo. Our formal announcements and presentation will begin promptly at 7pm in the front room. That room is still in development with limited seating so we encourage you to bring your own chair in you need it. Socializing will take place in the rear area near the brewhouse to give our officers and presenter everyone's full attention. Sampling and sharing homebrew is welcome but we please ask that you do it in 3 oz. samples to keep us within the letter of the law. If you have membership or other club business to attend to, we recommend arriving before 7pm or meeting with one of the officers after the formal presentation. And please help us tidy up and be on our merry way by 9pm.
Meeting Parking
Many of you submitted comments with last month's feedback survey mentioning the limited parking situation at BBC. We are aware of the situation but wanted to bring up a couple of points. First, both last month and this month the entire city of Kalamazoo was dealing with large amounts of snow and BBC wasn't the only business in town that had their parking capacity drastically limited. Second, we are large and ever growing group and the officers are trying our best to accomodate this. We estimated 70 or more people at last month's meeting which would be large for any venue and is a far cry from the 20 attendees we used to have just a few years ago.
With all this in mind, we ask that you help us to minimize the issue. If possible, we encourage everyone to carpool to limit the total number of cars. With the alcohol consumption that inevitably occurs at our meetings, this could limit the number of people drinking and driving if you are able to designate a driver as well. We also ask that everyone try to make the best of the limited space available. BBC has informed us that we can park all the way to rear of the lot as the other businesses are not attended at night. To help meet that end, we are calling for volunteers to help us keep the lot organized. If you want to help make everyone's night more enjoyable, please contact us let us know you want to help.
We did want to make everyone aware that the Graphic Packaging lot on the SW corner of Pitcher and Patterson is not open to the public. If you park there, you are doing so at your own risk. And lastly, we ask that everyone be patient with us as we try to make our sudden growth spurt as painless as possible. Help us be part of the solution so we can all enjoy what's most important...THE BEER!
Spring Bus Trip
Part of enjoying good craft beer is the adventure and exploring new places. For that reason, we are once again happy to announce plans for our annual Spring Bus Trip!
We have chartered a 54 passenger coach for Saturday, March 29th. Our route will take us from downtown Kalamazoo and head east to Ann Arbor, making several stops all along the way. Here is a tentative itinerary:
- Leave Shakespeare's Pub at 10am
- Arrive at Darkhorse Brewing just before 11am. For those interested, there is a tour that costs $10 and includes a logo pint glass and 6 samplers. Leave at 12:30pm.
- Arrive at Wolverine State Brewing at 1:30pm. Leave around 2:30pm.
- Arrive in downtown Ann Arbor around 3:00pm. Everyone is free is explore the various breweries in the area which include Blue Tractor, Grizzly Peak, Arbor Brewing and Jolly Pumpkin. Leave promptly at 6pm.
- One last stop at Chelsea Ale House at 6:30/7:00pm. Leave at 7:30/8:00pm.
- Arrive back at Shakespeare's Pub after 9:00pm
All along the way there will be games and prizes. Food will be available at each stop but we encourage you to plan ahead as we want to keep to our schedule so everyone can get home at a decent hour and we don't have to cut any of the later stops short. We have made arrangements to phone in a lunch order to Wolverine State while we are en route.
Ticket sales will begin at February meeting. We expect this to be a popular trip so we are going to limit ticket sales to members in good standing. Each member is allowed one guest. If after the February meeting we still have tickets available, we will open it up for additional guests to be invited. Prices will be $20 for members and $25 for guests.
If you have any questions or want to help make this a successful club event, feel free to contact trip organizer Chelsey Wyant or president Chris Elston.
National Homebrew Conference Registration
As we mentioned in a previous email, registration for the NHC will be held from February 19th-26th. There is no advantage to registering first or last but you must register during this time. There are limited number of tickets available and if the number of registrants exceeds that, there will be a lottery. During the registration process, you are entitled to invite one guest. Both you and this guest must be AHA members prior to registration so you should take care of that ASAP. Given this approach, we are recommending member register in pairs in order to maximize the number of KLOB representatives. If you or your guest cannot attend, we will work to get your ticket to a fellow member.
You can read more about the process on the AHA's website. We are also looking for volunteers to help organize our club's involvement and eventually come up with the theme for our Club Night booth. If you are interested in either, please contact us.
NHC Beer
One of the most enjoyable parts of the NHC is sharing our homebrew with people from around the country. As a club, we will have two opportunities to do so: Club Night on Friday evening and during a Social Well shift. For each of these times we are estimating we need 12 five gallon kegs making 24 total batches. To help organize this effort, we have set up a sign-up form on our website:
http://www.klob.org/nhc-2014-signup-form
In order to keep track of who posted what, you must be signed in with your website account to access this form. You can do that here:
http://www.klob.org/user/logout
If you've never logged in or have forgotten your password, you can use this form to reset it:
http://www.klob.org/user/password
You'll only be allowed to post once but after you do, you can edit your submission. We will have all the compiled results here:
http://www.klob.org/nhc-2014-signup-results
Remember: we are striving for quality over quantity! Consider contributing your best recipe or possibly one that earned a lot of compliments or awards. Beers with clever or adventurous ingredients are always fun...just make sure it's a recipe you have tried before and are pleased with the results.
We are also looking for a team to assist with special batch that treasurer Geoff Groff will be leading. As a sign of solidarity, every club from Michigan is going to bring their own interpretation of Founders's Kentucky Breakfast Stout. If you want to help develop the recipe or participate in the brewing process, contact Geoff (ggroff42@ctsmail.net).
Hop Head Farms Order Drop-Off at Monthly Meetings
Some of you may be aware that you can order hops from our good friends at Hop Head Farms.
http://hop-head-farms.myshopify.com/collections/hops
They have a wide selections of variety both grown here in Southwest Michigan but also several new imported varieties from their partners in Germany.
Thanks to efforts of our membership benefits liaison, HHF is now offering free delivery to our monthly meetings. When you place your order, make sure to select "Pick Up at Farm" for your shipping option. When you receive your order confirmation email, reply or forward to bonnie@hopheadfarms.com and include the message "KLOB Pick-Up".
To get this exclusive offer, there needs to be a minimum of 3 orders for drop-off. Orders need to be placed before noon on the Friday leading up to our monthly meeting. That means tomorrow! So spread the word and coordinate with your fellow KLOB members to get those orders in! There is also a special promo code just for KLOB members in good standing. If you don't already have the code, please contact us.