Brewing Education - Call for Volunteers

In the past year, we have seen a significant increase in the quality of the beers being brought in by fellow homebrewers and I feel that a large part of that has been due to increased education among the membership, not just in terms of the Commercial Examples Tasting portion of the meeting, but in having the group evaluate the beers brought in for Homebrewers' Corner. I feel that continued education and research will breed better beers and with that, I have an invitation to announce.

Historically, the Commercial Tasting has been secondary and somewhat passively approached by a single person leading the tasting. One of the goals over the next year plus is to have this portion of the meeting become more educational and more focused on getting a feel for the style and techniques that go into specific styles. As such, at this time I would like to invite fellow members to volunteer for future Commercial tastings. The process is quite simple, I'd ask that you shoot me an email letting me know you have a particular style in mind. If we haven't done the style in the last 12-18 months or so, I'll give the go ahead and ask that you do a bit of research into the style, see if you can come up with some interesting facts and either you can write a blog post and forward to me or you can send me a basic outline and I'll put it together as a post. You also will be able to choose what beers for the tastings, we only ask that at least one of the beers is a classic example per the BJCP style guidelines. The club has budgeted for reimbursement as well. So please, send me your thoughts and let me know what you think would be a good style for the next tasting!

Meeting tonight!

Just a quick reminder that tonight's meeting will start with the homebrewer's corner at 7:30pm. As usual, our meeting will be at the Bridgeport VFW at 3202 S. May. See you there!

Style of the Month

So I thought I'd start a new tradition with the style of the month being handed over to me by our President and give a little history of the style, as well as outlining what differentiates this style from other styles. I'd also like to send an invitation to all brewers to let me know if you have a beer that you feel fits this style that you've brewed that you'd like included in the horizontal tasting.

To start things off, I thought we'd start this with BJCP Category 13E. - American Stout.

Per the BJCP Guidelines, which can be found at http://www.bjcp.org/2008styles/catdex.php, this style falls into a bit of a nowhere land between Foreign Extra Stout (which is an odd ball category all its own, but I'll save that for another time) and Russian Imperial Stout. It will have a moderate to strong roasted aroma, leaning towards coffee and cocoa and away from ashy. The hop character runs the gamut from medium to very low and tends toward American hops. There are a lot of optionals in this category, from ester and alcohol derived aromatics to the variances in hop flavor. Suffice it to say, this is a very flavorful beer with a wide berth of interpretation.

The primary defining character in these beers tends to be a moderately to moderately high OG and a distinctly American character. Commonly American hops and malts are used, as well as clean American yeast. I like to think of these beers as being the bigger brothers of Dry, Sweet and Oatmeal stouts, but not as big and burly as the Russian Imperial Stouts.

This is a style that has no real historical provenance and seems to have been the result of these types of beers showing up in the other stout categories but not really fitting into the historical guidelines of world classics such as Sam Smith's Oatmeal Stout or Guinness. As such, as with many other styles that are now considered classically American, a variation was born. The BJCP guide lists beers from most of the forerunners of American craft beer as brewing classic versions, namely Rogue Shakespeare Stout, Sierra Nevada Stout & North Coast Old No. 38.

Regarding next week's, and future, meeting(s), I intend to showcase the style and the variation within and hopefull will help to demonstrate how, even though there are definitions to each style, each brewer has a lot of options in terms of how (s)he can produce a beer "to style."

Cheers,

Brian

New Board of Directors

At last month's Jan. 18 meeting, we held our annual election for the board of directors. After the results were tallied, the newly elected board convened and appointed new officers:

Bob Brown (President)

Patrick Bowles (Treasurer)

Noel Wessely (Secretary)

Lovey Bissett

Klavs Dolmer

Brian Eichorn

Steve Marsala

Please wish us and all of HOPS! in having another successful year in 2011!

Ferm Wrap

I was over at Matt and Meg's blog and found this post that describes how to make a really inexpensive Ferm Wrap. There is a link to the company that supplies the parts, and they will even put it together for you. It's a nice solution when you want to raise fermentation temps. You could take advantage of the cold weather and use the wrap to make a lager. A temperature controller is required which they also sell.

Anyone interested? We could save on shipping.

Drinking and Writing at the Haymarket!

First, apologies for our extended absence here at the blog... Rest assured we're still brewing and meeting; we just sort of let the blog fall to the wayside. We're doing some retooling and adding some fresh faces to the blog so we hope you'll be back for regular postings from here on out.

Apologies aside, I wanted to let everybody know about a couple cool events going on at Chicago's newest brewpub, Haymarket. Haymarket is home to the Drinking & Writing Brewery (which puts on the annual Beerfly Alleyfight in which several HOPS! brewers participate), and they've recently announced that their awesome post-holiday show, To Cure A Hangover, has been extended until March 5th. It plays every Saturday at 4pm and I can't stress enough how great it is. You can get your tickets here.

Also, this Monday (which just happens to be Valentine's Day) at 7:37 pm is the inaugural meeting of Local 737, Haymarket's Mug Club. What's particularly cool about this mug club is that the Drinking & Writing Brewery will be curating an art performance at every tapping. This particular meeting will feature a cornucopia of artists including Christopher Piatt, Dr. Chloe Johnston, Rachel Claff, Rawson Vint, Jamie Budzick and Dina Walters as well as the tapping of their Agitator Double IPA. Oh, and the cost is a whopping $1, so hope you're ready to splurge.

Here at HOPS! we like to support all of our local breweries and brewpubs, and we'll try to post events here are we learn of them. Cheers!