March Meeting Recap!
Ian setup for his commercial tasting
For those of you who were unable to attend this past week’s club meeting at Culver City Homebrew Supply, here are the recap notes from the meeting along with a few pictures I grabbed. First though, a huge thank you to the guys at CCHBS for hosting the meeting in the shop – it was great to get everyone in there for the night and good to be back for the month. Also another special thank you to Ian Fraser for doing an awesome job with the commercial style of the month with his epic Stout offerings. I think the bar has just been set for how to gather up beer for the monthly beer style! Here are the important notes from this weeks meeting:
- Next month’s First Friday will be held on Friday April 4th at Gulp! in West LA. Details can be found here. Kingsley and I went there for lunch a few weeks back to check it out and the beer selection is fantastic. It should make for an awesome First Friday.
- Next month’s club meeting is going to be on April 17th @ Smog City in Torrance. Details can be found here. Porter has offered to host us for another club meeting and also host the style of the month – IPA’s. There is still plenty of time to brew up a good IPA for this meeting – so get to work!
- Speaking of style of the month, May is still available, along with the rest of the month’s for the year (as far as I know at least). The list of monthly beer styles can be found here. If you are interested (and hey, why wouldn’t you be – you get to buy a bunch of beer and the club pays for it!) in hosting the monthly style please send an email to Dean Sussman @ styles@pacificgravity.com to volunteer.
- Membership dues are due now. If you haven’t yet paid for this year’s membership you can do so by visiting CCHBS and paying there or you can send a check to our PO box which is:
- P.O. Box 2451, Culver City, Ca 90231. Checks can be made payable to Pacific Gravity.
- This year the club has started to gather additional discounts for club membership. In addition to the 5% off you receive as a club member at CCHBS you will now receive 10% off at City Tavern in Culver City if you show your 2014 ID Card (which will be issued at the next meeting).
- The annual Mayfaire competition hosted by the Maltose Falcons is coming up and entries are due at CCHBS by April 10th.
- Unfortunately the SCHF was officially canceled this past month. All clubs were asked to cancel their reservations, which we have done. Our replacement plan for that weekend is a possible bus trip with the Long Beach and Strand clubs – details to follow. In addition, we are trying to get the three clubs together to do a collaborative bottle share on the 17th of May – details on both events will hopefully be posted by the end of this upcoming week.
- I also want to throw out a special thank you to the guys at Strand Brewers club for including us in their bus trip down to Stone, Lost Abbey and White Labs. It was a great trip with a lot of great beer to taste on the bus and at the breweries. I took pictures at the event and attached them to this post for those of you who want to browse through.
- And finally with the club hosting Pacific Brewers Cup this year we are finally going to file the appropriate paperwork in an effort to make the club a 501c3 Non Profit corporation. Along with this filing we will be requesting Tax Exempt status from the IRS. This will allow us greater opportunities for fundraising and sponsorship gathering for this year’s competition, among other advantages. In the next few weeks we will be finalizing a draft of our club bylaws and issuing it to everyone via email. At next month’s club meeting we will be voting as a club to enact/ratify (whatever the legal term is) the bylaws so that Dean can proceed with the rest of the filing paperwork. This is an important first step and time is not on our side. We need to get this initial paperwork filed as soon as possible so that we can begin to acquire more and more sponsors for the competition.
Thanks again to everyone who came out for the club meeting this week, and another special thank you to everyone who brought beer. Bringing homebrew to club meetings is an essential component of who we are as a group. If you have some great homebrew – bring it! If you have some homebrew that just doesn’t taste right and you aren’t sure why – bring it! We have plenty of experienced judges and brewers in our club who can offer their insight into your problematic brews to help you refine your process.
I am hoping to get to taste some awesome IPA’s at next month’s meeting at Smog City – and not just Smog’s beers – please bring out some of your brews!
See you all soon.
Brian
