LABBC Status – Please visit our sponsors!

/in , , /by


Thank you for participating in the 2020 Los Angeles Belgian Brew Challenge! This year we judged 68 beers and had some really good entries.
I’m sure you are eager to hear the results.  However, the California Shelter-In-Place order resulting from the COVID-19 crisis has precluded us from conducting the Best of Show round.  We fully intend to finish this off once the order has been lifted.  To protect the integrity of the BOS judging process, we are withholding a listing of all the awards until BOS has been completed.  BOS entries are being stored in a cooler for the duration.   If you entered the competition, you should have received an email from Tim Bardet with your scoresheets.  We realize that timely feedback is important in any homebrew competition.  Also, on hold are details of the awards ceremony.  Once we have all the results and awards details, we will post them on the LABBC website.

In the meantime, our sponsors could use your help.  They don’t have on-site consumption, but most of them are taking on-line and delivery orders.

Our host brewery Los Angeles Ale Works is open daily from 12noon-8:00 pm for pickup of cans and crowlers.  No shipping or delivery offered on beer at the moment.  Read more →

Pacific Gravity response to the Coronavirus (COVID -19)

/in , , , , /by

Dear Club Members,

Considering the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), we want to assure you that Pacific Gravity is taking every precaution to ensure the health and safety of our membership and guests. In an abundance of caution and to avoid exposure the Board has decided to suspend club meetings and events for the short term as this situation develops.

As of this moment, judging for LABBC will still happen this Sunday (3/15), but this could change, so please check for any last-minute notices. Given that this is a discretionary event, we recognize that some of you may wish to not participate. If this is the case, please contact Carl Townsend (Head judge)  as soon as possible.

We will be taking a number of precautions at the judging site to avoid any unnecessary exposure. Specifically,
1) You will be asked point blank as you enter if you are sick, or even think you might be sick, or if you have been exposed to anyone with Covid-19. (We would hope that you would refrain from even coming out.)
2) Please avoid unnecessary body contact. Do a fist-bump if necessary, but avoid shaking hands or hugs. We will be spreading you out to avoid crowding.
3) Please wash your hands thoroughly using the CDC guidelines a couple of times throughout the morning. We will provide plastic gloves for use if desired. If you have hand sanitizer, please bring some along.
4) Do not pass around cups of beer. Do not swig out of the bottles, even if they are nearly empty. We will have plenty of cups available.
5) Lunch will be served up by our chef. Please do not serve yourself. If the weather cooperates, please spread out to eat using the outdoor tables. (This also avoids food smells in the judging area.)

Other Upcoming Events:
The March meeting scheduled for March 19th is cancelled.
The Monster brew scheduled for March 28, 2020 at Smog City Brewing is postponed, tentatively until May.
AHA has notified us that the first round judging for the National Homebrew Conference has been postponed.
We are staying in contact with the CHA and monitoring their response and will provide updates about SCHBF (May 1-3, 2020) as they become available.

While there are no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in our club’s membership and public health officials assess our risk to be low, we are focused on caring for the health and well being of our members, their families and our community at large.

We apologize for any inconvenience this situation has caused.

Please maintain your focus on keeping yourselves and your families safe and healthy.

Sincerely,

Ian Fraser
President
Pacific Gravity Homebrewers

Pacific Gravity – Annual Dues

/in /by

It’s Time to Do the Dues!
It’s March and that means its time for our annual Pacific Gravity membership dues collection. All club members need to pay their dues to keep their membership active until March 2021. Annual dues are $36 for individuals or $54 for couples and are prorated for members who joined the club within the last year.
There are several ways you can renew your annual dues. Club Treasurer, Craig Corley will be collecting dues at the upcoming March club meeting and other upcoming club events. You can go old school and send Pacific Gravity a check to PO Box 2451, Culver City CA 90231. And for the ultimate in convenience, you can renew your dues online via the PayPal links below:

Individual Membership – Full 1-year Renewal
Couples Membership – Full 1-year Renewal
Prorated Membership – Partial year Renewal

All current club members should have gotten a renewal notice via email detailing their dues renewal amount and member information on file. This is a good opportunity to update our membership records, so please let Craig know of any changes to your member information (address, email, phone, etc) or include changes with your check/renewal form.
For any individual members who might be interested, the couples membership provides full membership status/benefits to both partners of a couple including membership cards, emails, etc. Note that the couples membership is optional, couples can continue with one partner being an individual member and the other being their guest. If you’d like to upgrade your individual membership to a couples membership, your dues amount will be 1.5 times the billed amount and you’ll need to include your partner’s name and email along with your payment.

Keep in mind that your dues are the primary way we fund such club activities as club parties, monthly meetings, club brews and much more. Your paid membership also ensures that you’ll continue to receive the many club benefits available.
Have questions about your dues or how much you owe? Check with Craig at the March club meeting or by email at [email protected]
Note: Some of you may get 2 email renewal notices due to a limiting issue with my email host. A large number of the first emailing of the notices bounced and it was unclear what did or didn’t get sent. To make sure everyone gets their renewal notices, I am sending them a 2nd time (in small batches this time).

 

The 25th Anniversary Celebration continues at the Stuffed Sandwich!

/in /by
We have secured a bus to drive us out to the Stuffed Sandwich, on March 7th, in San Gabriel where Marlene is expecting us and will put forth some specials to keep us occupied! Also as we have done in the past, we will do a pre-order of sandwiches, anyone who does the pre-order option gets to skip the line once we arrive.

The plan as it currently stands is the Bus will depart from Veterans Park in Culver City, 4117 Overland Avenue, Culver City, CA, United States, 90230 at 12:00 NOON and return at 6:00 PM that evening.

Date:  March 7, 2020 Let me repeat, the bus departs at 12:00 Noon, sharp!

Please show now later than 11:30 AM to be sure to be on board!

The cost for each passenger is $25.00 You can pay buy cash, check or pay pal using this link:  https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=AKBQPJCJDE9VS

We only have room for 30 riders, so while Pacific Gravity members get first dibs on the seats, we will open it up to the other brew clubs to sell any remaining seats. Your seat is only guaranteed once we receive payment.

Please reserve your seat IMMEDIATELY; in order to try and sell the trip out, we will open it up to the other beer clubs starting on March 2, 2020.

If you remember the bus trips of old, you know you won’t want to miss this!

Cheers,

Ian Fraser

President

25th Anniversary Club Meeting Thursday February 20th

/in /by

Our 25th Anniversary Club meeting is finally here! This is the actual month of this club’s creation 25 years ago!

We will meet on 02/20/2020 at Neil Saund’s Party Duplex. It is located at 12966 Rubens Ave. Los Angeles, CA (At Alla Road).

We plan to make this a bit more of an event then your typical meeting. We will be firing up the BBQ’s for this event and cooking a true Pacific Gravity flashback of Carne Asada (and other flavors) street tacos! Ian and Dean are in charge of the food and plan to do it right!

Our commercial style of the month is: Barleywines; hosted by Dominic and Jun!

We have lots to update you on and will have sign up sheets for bus ride to The Stuffed Sandwich. If you want to secure your seat on the bus, bring $25 to the meeting to pay for it. This is one bus ride you do not want to miss!

This meeting will be a big one and probably go late! If you can, take Friday off!

Cheers,

Ian
President

 

The 25th Anniversary Celebration continues at the Stuffed Sandwich!

/in /by

We have secured a bus to drive us out to the Stuffed Sandwich in San Gabriel where Marlene is expecting us and will put forth some specials to keep us occupied! Also as we have done in the past, we will do a pre-order of sandwiches, anyone who does the pre-order option gets to skip the line once we arrive.

The plan as it currently stands is the Bus will depart from Veterans Park in Culver City, 4117 Overland Avenue, Culver City, CA, United States, 90230 at 12:00 NOON and return at 6:00 PM that evening.

Let me repeat, the bus departs at 12:00 Noon, sharp!

Please show now later then 11:30 AM to be sure to be on board!

The cost for each passenger is $25.00

We only have room for 30 riders, so while Pacific Gravity members get first dibs on the seats, we will open it up to the other brew clubs to sell any remaining seats. Your seat is only guaranteed once we receive payment. We will have sign up sheets at the bottle share and the February meeting.

If you remember the bus trips of old, you know you won’t want to miss this!

Cheers,

Ian Fraser

25th Anniversary Bottle Share

/in /by

Greetings! February is the Pacific Gravity’s 25 Anniversary month and we are setting up many events to celebrate with you! Last Friday we hit Jon Porter’s new tap room, Smog City West.  We had a great turn out and Porter himself was there but NOT WORKING and he got to hang out with the gang, pour some samples of his sour projects, proved he is smoother then I am throwing a ring on a hook and generally had a good time!  If you missed it, you missed a great event!  We even set the date for our upcoming monster brew!

Next up we are planning a ‘25th Anniversary Bottle Share’ on Saturday, February 15 at the 4th Horseman in Long Beach…any of you who went last year will know that Martin pulls out some crazy beers for this event.  We will get started at 2 PM. 4th Horseman:  121 W 4th St Long Beach, CA 90802

This event is to celebrate the bottle shares of old, bring a bottle or two from your beer stash to share with the group!  Please limit yourself to only bring 2 750’s of beer to share to avoid having a ton of undrunk beer at the end of the event.  Any beer not poured will be confiscated and served at the 25th anniversary club meeting at Neil’s party duplex on Feb. 20th, 2020.

Our 25th Anniversary Club meeting is on 2/20/2020 at Neil Saund’s Party Duplex.  It is located at 12966 Rubens Ave. Los Angeles, CA (At Alla Road).  This will be a big one!  Take Friday off!  We will have food, we will have beer!  You will want to be there! For March’s First Friday (on Saturday March 7, 2020) we are planning to arrange a bus trip to the Stuffed Sandwich, Marlene has promised to put together something special for us to celebrate our year.  Details on this are being worked out as we speak…but mark the date!

The LABBC will be held in March also, so get brewing and enter that competition! As I stated above we set the date for the Smog City monster brew, it will be on March 28, 2020 at Smog City, stay tuned for updates on this as well!  There will be much more big brews, pub crawls, and road trips!  So stay tuned to the social media pages and email notifications!

 

Cheers,

 

Ian President

First Friday at Smog City West Feb 7th

/in /by

Greetings,

For First Friday this month we are visiting Smog City’s newest tap room location located at 22755 Hawthorne Blvd, Torrance, CA 90505. We will get started about 7:00 PM.

This is a very busy month! Please mark your calendars for the following:

2/15/2020 25th anniversary bottle share at the 4th Horseman (Hosted by Martin Svab)
2/20/2020 the 25th anniversary (The actual!) club meeting to be held at Neil Saund’s Alla Road party pad!
3/7/2020 The Stuffed Sandwich party!

Cheers,
Ian

It’s Time to Enter LABBC

/in /by

Pacific Gravity’s first homebrew competition for 2020 is now open for business!  Registration is now up and running at http://comp.belgianbrewchallenge.com/  On-line registration will run up until March 6th at 6:00 PM.  Entries can be dropped off at the local homebrew shops, or directly at our host brewery, Los Angeles Ale Works in Hawthorne, starting on February 21st.

Judging for Los Angeles Belgian Brew Challenge will be held this year at Los Angeles Ale Works, on Sunday, March 15, 2020.    Back again are all your favorite Belgian styles as described in the BJCP guidelines, along with the ever-popular Belgian Specialty Category 35A.

A new feature this is is that we will have TWO Pro-Am opportunities for the Best of Show Beer and a second beer to be selected between Los Angeles Ale Works and Smog City Brewing.

In addition to your entries, we need judges and stewards to make this all work.  You can sign up for either at  http://comp.belgianbrewchallenge.com/index.php?section=volunteers .  All volunteers will get a tee shirt, so make sure you enter in your tee shirt size.

Other upcoming events:
Feb. 7, 2020 First Friday at Smog Cites newest taproom, Smog City West
Feb. 15, 2020 25th anniversary bottleshare at 4th Horseman
Feb. 20, 2020 25th Anniversary Club meeting at Neil Saunds
March 7, 2020, 1st Saturday Bus Trip to Stuffed Sandwich

Competition Update – AFC and State Fair

/in /by

Our first competition of the year First up is America’s Finest City, run by QUAFF in San Diego.   Registration is now open at https://quaff.org/AFC-2020/ .  I’ll be heading to San Diego Friday morning 1/31, so if you get you entries to my place no later than Thursday 1/30, they will get personal service.  Or, you can ship them off for arrival by Friday to  AleSmith Brewing Company, 9990 AleSmith Ct, San Diego, CA 92126. 

The next competition is the California State Fair.  This one has been moving earlier in the season each of the last several years.  Registration is already open at http://home.castatefair.beer/.  You can drop off entries at South Bay or Eagle Rock shops, but they must be packed for shipping.  Local drop-off is February 3 – February7, 2020.  I‘ll be heading to Eagle Rock on Thursday morning February 6th, so if you drop them off by Wednesday, Feb 5th, I’ll take them along.  They still need to be packed for shipping. 

Next up is first round of the AHA Nationals.    Placement announcements and payment must be made by February 14.  Entry drop-off then runs from February 20th through March 5th.  Judging will begin on March 13th.  If you can make the trip to San Diego at the end of February of Early march, please let me know.

Carl Townsend
Competition Coordinator