Our January meeting will be held January 16, 2020 at Tortugo Brewing. We will get started about 7:30 pm

Club meeting at Tortugo Brewing
916 W. Hyde Park Blvd. Inglewood CA 90302
7:30 PM

This is our “anything goes” meeting, so bring any type of beer you want to bring!

Our commercial tasting host will be: Dean Sussman who graciously won’t tell us what he is bringing because even he does not know it yet! Surprise!

We will introduce our new Board Members as well as go over some details of upcoming events and get your feedback on our plans!

Dates to Remember:
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

Cheers,

Ian
President

Good afternoon PG!

I hope this reminder reaches you all well and enjoying your end-of-summer. Thursday is our September club meeting at Culver City Home Brewing Supply and it should be a very fun one, so I hope you’ll come out. We get started at 7:30p and finish up around 10:30p usually.

September’s host Keith is bringing out a flight of IPA’s for the commercial tasting and we’ll have some hot food on hand as well. Bring out your IPA styled home brew for the Best of Meeting competition. It’s a great way to get feedback on your beer and winner takes a nice prize.

In other news, the board and I are looking ahead to the chili cook-off on November 11th, and we’re thinking elections too as they are usually held around that time of year. If you are interested in running for an elected position (President, Vice President, Treasurer) or might like to be club Secretary or any of our other volunteer positions please reach out. Having been on the board for almost two years now, I can confirm it’s a satisfying way to spend some free time. There is a work aspect to it, but that’s really about perspective. If you already attend most events, and have enough time to put in one more evening per month to help plan (and talk beers,) it’s worth considering and we’d love to have you on board.

I’ll end with a link to our events calendar for you. Take a peek at the next few months and plan ahead. I realize there are hundreds of things to do in this city but I’m hopeful you’ll keep us on your radar!

http://pacificgravity.com/event-calendar/

Thanks!

Michael

Tomorrow Dec. 2nd Pacific Gravity will be headed to Smog City for our last First Friday 2016! Come and enjoy some of the best LA beers in town with our friends at Smog.

Smog City Brewery
1901 Del Amo Blvd B, Torrance, CA 90501

Check out the PG even page link below for more info:
http://pacificgravity.com/events/first-friday-smog-city-december/ (note: this event was changed from Holy Cow to Smog City)

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Then Sunday Dec. 4th, Bring back your cider you made from the Honest Abe Cider Collection a few months back. We will be sharing them with Strand Brew Club and Honest Abe for a chance to win Best Cider Maker! Everyones invited, bring bottles, growlers, or kegs and get some great feed back on how you did on you cider. Should be a fun day at Honest Abe!

Honest Abe Cider
17800 S Main St #105, Gardena, CA 90248

Check out the link below of the Facebook invite put together by Strand Brewers:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1690467347933410/     UPDATE: It looks like that page was moved or taken down, but we’ll have more info on this event to follow!

– The style of the meeting is lagers. You may bring bottles, growlers, and kegs of home brewed beers. The club will purchase tastes of beer from the hotel, hopefully they will have some good examples of the style.

– The meeting will begin at 7:30 PM and end at 10 PM. Please encourage the hotel to host us again by planning on eating dinner at the hotel beforehand. Light snacks will be provided during the tasting, but it won’t be enough to replace a meal.

Four Points by Sheraton Los Angeles Airport
9750 Airport Blvd · Los Angeles, CA 90045 · United States · Phone: 310-645-4600

This is a bit of an experiment, so I’d welcome constructive feedback on how this goes.

The Richmond Bar and Grill is located at 145 Richmond St  El Segundo, CA 90245

Not enough to sway you away away from Glee?  Well this is one of my favorite meetings for beer tastings – extract beers.  Are you a new brewer who wants feedback on your early work?  Bring them to this meeting and enter them in our club only competition – all styles are eligible as long as the majority of the malt used is from liquid or dried malt extract.  Plus anyone who brings extract based beer will be eligible for our beer of the meeting award, which is a $25 gift certificate to Culver City Home Brewing Supply.  Personally I’ll be bringing a keg of English Best Bitter made from the malt extract I won at the raffle at the last meeting. And even if you are an all grain brewer, bring your recent work to the meeting.  Nothing improves your skills like comparing notes with and receiving feedback form our experienced membership.  Our commercial tasting will be English and Scottish ales, so expect more than a few old favorites to be pouring after our announcements.

Finally, we’ll have a selection of t-shirts and other club swag available for purchase at the meeting, so if you want to represent on the road trip, Ojai, or just on Fridays at the Daily Pint make sure you bring your checkbook.  See you tomorrow night!

 Answer:    The simple answer to this is to join us on Jockey Box/Chili Cook-off and Big Brew Day, Saturday, October 20^th at Carl Townsend’s house.   You bring a cooler, and we’ll bring a bunch of supplies, so at the end of the day you can head home with a new portable beer serving system.

The critical thing from a planning standpoint is to let us know ahead of time how many taps you want, so we can plan accordingly.    I need to place the order for tubing in advance, so if you haven’t already signed up at the August or September club meeting and want to join the construction project, please send me an email at Competitions@PacificGravity.com by Oct 1^st.   Each line will get a ten-foot piece of 3/8” stainless steel tubing, and you can buy as many lines as you want.

Tom Rierson has come up with the lightest and simplest jockey box concept I’ve seen.  It also happens to be inexpensive to build.  Best of all, in the blink of an eye, it can go back to just being a cooler.  The heart of the system is a zig-zag piece of stainless steel tubing that neatly fits into the bottom of the cooler.  We’ll be bending these up on jockey box day to exactly fit your cooler.  Multiple coils can fit easily at the bottom of the box.  My box shown here, has four taps, though it can easily accommodate six taps and even more if you have a bigger box.

Then, some flexible hoses connect up to ball locks or pin locks (whichever type your keg has).  The outlet as shown here is a set of picnic taps, mounted in a piece of insulation.  Tom has done some temperature studies to show that in fact your beer will come out cold even on a hot day.  The ten-foot sections of tubing are perfect for the sampler sized pours of beer.  If you want to pull larger servings of beer, you can hook up the coils in series.

The base cost of each line is about $35, (or a bit less if we order enough tubing) depending on what options you want to add.  If you already have ball locks hose clamps and tubing, you can just get the stainless tube.  A popular, but somewhat pricey option is to build in feed-though shanks and put in a set standard faucet taps.  We’ll have the 7/8” circle-saw cutter on hand if you want to go with this option.  We did this with the club expansion system that we built on the last jockey box day, to make an elegant professional look.

In addition to the jockey box construction, we will be holding a big brew session and our annual chili cook-off competition.  We have room for about 5 brewers so bring your kettles.  Bring a crock pot of your favorite red for lunch.  Prizes will be awarded for best chili and most interesting chili.  We’ll provide some sides to go with it.  And, of course, were gonna need some kegs of beer to test out the new lines!

Carl’s house is at 3621 Redwood in the Mar Vista part of Los Angeles, 90066.  Hope to see you there!

Got a question for the Brewmaster?  Drop me a line at brewmaster@picobrewery.com.  Also, an archive of prior questions can be found at the Picobrewery website at http://www.picobrewery.com/ask.html.

I’m still looking for volunteers to host the Commercial Tasting this meeting so email me at president@pacificgravity.com if you are interested.  Also, make sure you bring some cash for raffle tickets, our new club glasses, Club of the Year shirts, and other paraphernalia.

In attendance: Audrey, Dave M., Craig, Carl, Victor, Terry, Dave S.

Not in Attendance: Kurt

President: Audrey

• Non-Profit Status: Per accountant’s advice: 501c(7) is appropriate choice for PG, most income is directly related to running the club for its intended purpose of a being social club, which keeps us in the appropriate range for tax purposes.  Recommended we use LegalZoom.com unless we have any lawyers willing to help us for free, online may actually be easier anyway, small fee, began going through this process, will determine what further information is needed.  By-laws on hold until clarification on what, if any, additional and specific information is needed.
• Calendar/Upcoming Events: First Saturday 7/7 @ City Tavern (3:30pm), FF 8/3 @ Four Points Sheraton Pool, AHA Mead Day Sat 8/4, FF 9/7 @ Tomm Carroll’s Trux Stop.
• Summer Party: Sat 7/21, 1-8pm @ Neil’s duplex on Rubens Ave, Oktoberfest theme, no minors or pets.  Fees: members free, all guests $10, admittance will be capped.  Set-up Sat 7/14 & Fri 7/20, volunteers needed for set-up, clean-up, food prep, & cooking.  General raffle + silent auction for club brew system.
• SCHF (Victor): Recap & recommendations / changes for next year: more definite schedule for booth (esp. during dinner shift time), CDS set-up Fri pm & Sat am and break-down Sun am (determine set times & volunteers ahead of time), make sure all kegs are labeled before going over to booth (leave in campsite to ID & take over Sat am), build new PVC support for club banner (thicker PVC- 1inch, shorter, maybe add awning too?), new large PG banner soon perhaps.
• Road Trips (Kurt): OC on Sat 6/9 cancelled due to lack of interest/not enough paid riders.  Will wait to plan another one for a while.
• Craft Art & Folk Art Museum Homebrew Event: Sunday 7/15 (5-8pm), Contact: club member Gregory Nylen (nyleng@gtlaw.com), What: discussing & sharing local craft / homebrewing, Where: Museum address: 5814 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036, www.cafam.org, Bring: 1-2 styles to share, preferably in keg, though a six pack could work, opportunity to share & talk about their brews, Cost: $10 for CAFAM members, $15 for non-members, and will include admission to the museum, which is having a very cool baseball related exhibition at the moment in addition to others (check it out here: http://www.cafam.org/).  Brewers who bring beer for sampling will of course get free admission (and a dog!).  We will also have some snacks and a DJ, Food: Specialty hot dog food truck (Let’s Be Frank) cart will be inside.
• Merchandise (Terry/Audrey): New Glasses– selected Discount Mugs #2860AL w/2 color logo (PG oval red/black), 4wks to process & ship (will be here by summer party).  COY shirts– 11 left (past break-even point- all profit now).  Leashes– made about 90 for SCHF – sold out quickly ($450, $150 material cost, $300 profit), will make another batch (maybe increase velcro length some to accommodate larger glasses).

Vice President: Dave

• Asset Manager: Has key to storage unit, will manage supplies for club meetings, make copies of key.
• Club Meetings: Meeting set-up going well, posting monthly article to recruit homebrew kegs in style of the month and style tasting volunteers.

Treasurer: Craig

• Finance: Current balance $6,366.65 as of 6/1.  Annual Budget still has deficit of $1,530 so fundraising needed & additional expenses need to be approved ahead of time, we cannot utilize PayPal until we have legal status.
• Membership: 280 members, 4 new in May, 31 in 2012 ($1,025- target 60 new in total this year), 113 past-due in June, 26 due July 2012-Feb 2013, 137 paid through March 2013, collected $3,036 in dues as of 6/7 (119 renewals), Craig to continue announcing/collecting, Late fee of $5 after May meeting or 60 days after expiring (all dues up for renewal March of each year)
• Summer Party Budget: $2,300 based on last year’s expenses (Food: $1,000, Supplies: $250, Rentals: $400, Awards/Raffle Prizes: $300, Equipment: $100, Other/Decorations: $250).  Income from last year: $750 (Raffle: $500, Guest Fees: $250).

Competitions: Carl

• COC Schedule: July- Porters (due 8/10/12, entries due @ CCHBS Fri 7/13 or by 12pm @ Neil’s for judging) September- Light Hybrids (due 10/6/12, judge at Sept club meeting), October- Old Ales (due 11/10/12, judge at Oct club meeting), January/February 2013- Un-Session Beers (OG>1.040, due date TBA, but January meeting likely), March/April 2013- Barleywine (Feb meeting for judging).
• Competition Schedule: July- LA County Fair, September- PBC hosted by Strand, October- CA State Homebrew Comp.

Communications: Victor

• Flyer: Continue to create monthly & leave in store, including July even though no club meeting that month.
• Brochure @ CCHBS: Out of date, will make new one with new member sign-up sheet.
• Website: Dave S.- Server transfer complete & ready to switch over, new version of site ready, has new functions such as member login, forums / discussion boards, RSVP to events, & picture sharing available.  Board will review, send feedback & make modifications over next week prior to launching.  Plan to go live by club meeting & use for summer party planning / attendance / volunteering.

Are you interested in running the commercial tasting this month?  While it might be difficult to find commercial examples of English Mild in bottles, American breweries are turning out some pretty good brown ales these days.  Send me an email at vicepresident@pacificgravity.com and you can go shopping for beer on the club’s dime.