Greetings all.  We just had our first meeting of 2012.  If you couldn’t make it to this one, here is what you missed.

First off, John Sanatar gave some general announcements.  Dues for this year have been raised to $25.  Among other things, the extra money will go towards fees for the club to become a non-profit organization, compensation for people who donate kegs to events, providing incentives for club members to enter beers in competitions, and naturally, more beer at the meetings.  Additionally, we are working on getting the Davis Beer Shoppe to host a club only night for GBA members sometime in the near future, so keep an eye out for announcements about this.  Also, we should have more GBA clothing in soon.

Following the general information, Matt Boyer, the club’s new competition coordinator, let us know about some upcoming competitions and what he hopes to accomplish in this new position.  Several competitions are approaching.  There is a stout club-only competition in March, so at our next meeting we will be voting on the best stout to put forward to represent the GBA.  Other upcoming competitions include Celebrewtion in Sacramento, Battle of the Brews in Santa Rosa, and the World Cup of Beer in Oakland.  Some information for these has already been released on our mailing list, and more details are sure to follow.  These competitions are also a good opportunity for anyone who wants to try judging or stewarding.  To make it easier for everyone to enter, the club will arrange for an easy drop off point for entries, and one person will take care of delivering all of our club’s beers.

Anthony gave an update on what we are planning for Sacramento Beer Week, coming up at the end of February.  We will be at the Capital Beer Fest to kick things off, so start thinking of what you want to brew for it.  The club will put on a bike pub crawl in lieu of a brew day this year, as last year it seemed this was the more popular event.

The presentation this month was on how to brew your first beer.  It covered the basic equipment, an overview of the process for brewing an extract batch, and tips and common mistakes to watch out for.  A suggested order of equipment upgrades and purchases was provided, along with a list of helpful websites and resources for learning more about brewing.  This presentation can be found on the members only site.

The next meeting will take place on February 21^st in the banquet hall at Sudwerk.

Congrats to the greenbelts who placed in the CA state competition held this past weekend at Anchor Brewing in San Francisco, CA.  Results can be found here:

http://www.nchfinfo.org/images/stories/statecomp_forms/2011statecompawards.pdf

The following greenbelters placed in their respective categories:

Schuyler Campbell took 3rd place in the Pale ale Category for his “Wet Hop American Amber Ale”
Brad Hankee took  2nd place in the Specialty Category for his “Hankee’s Pumplin Harvest Ale”
Mike Matiasek: took  2nd place in the Belgian Ale Category for his “Witbier”

Not a bad way to close out the competition season!

Cheers!

Okay, so you found our site, and you thinking to yourself, “you know, making beer, that sounds like a fun hobby!”  But then you are faced with the obvious issue:  you don’t like waiting to learn stuff!  You have little patience for wikipedia to load on your iPhone, and having to wait a while to learn how to brew beer… well that might just be a deal breaker.  Well then…..YOUR IN LUCK!!!  You only have to wait a couple of days!!!!

This Saturday, November 5th, 2011, is AHA’s “Learn to Homebrew” Day.  And we, the Greenbelt Brewers Association, are doing our part to spread the knowledge of this hobby by hosting a brew at Sudwerks Brewery in Davis, CA (our homebase for all of our meetings as well).  We’ll be brewing a Kolsch, using Sudwerks’ all-grain 15 gallon pilot system.  We’ll be getting started around 9am, and hope to be “mashing in” (starting the actual process of brewing all grain) around 10-10:30am.  The event is open to everyone, so if you have been to a meeting, if you haven’t, if you’ve been brewing for a while, or just thinking about starting, then come on out and check it out!  We’ll probably be brewing until 2pm or thereabouts, so make sure to get there before then.

Sudwerks’ Dock Store will also be open, so you can grab a pint of beer to sip on while you enjoy the process!

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the GBA board (link on the right hand column) and we’ll do the best we can to answer.  Again, this event is open to the public, so head on down!

Hope to see you Saturday!

So, you’ve stumbled across our humble site, home of the Greenbelt Brewers Association, and you are curious, “what exactly does this brewing club do?”  You’re in luck!  Why?  Because here is a quick synopsis of what our little club has been up to these past several months!!!

In July, as mentioned in the post prior to this, our club hosted a ‘Single Hop Beer’ meeting.  Club attendees were given blind tastes of 13 different single-hop brews (all with the same recipe in terms of grain bill, IBU, and fermentation characteristics), and then had to record their initial tastes and thoughts.  Why blind?  Well, hop heads all know what different hops are supposed to taste/smell like…so we wanted to get more unbiased impressions!  The tastings were then all collected, and will be analyzed for posterity.  Missed the meeting?  No worries!  Become a dues paying member and access the results of over 50 people’s tastings to help you determine what hop you really want to use in your next brew!

July also saw the first ever GBA Family Picnic Day at Slide Hill Park in Davis.  The day was designed to bring together the families of members and to allow a little fun and friendly competition, as we played an excellent game of Kick Ball!  While fun was definitely had, it was determined that drinking beer in 95+ heat and then playing Kick Ball is definitely a challenge!  Next year, 5 innings will be the max!!

August’s meeting was 180 degrees from July’s, as club funk expert Andy Gray, introduced the club to the funky side of beers:  Sours!!!  The beers he brought to showcase the style were sublime and subtle, to mouthpuckerin’ sour!  As George Clinton is to Neil Diamond, thus are sours to nice clean lagers.  Many members left speaking of when they were going to be introducing strains of brett, pedio, mothers-in-laws, and all those other bugs into their breweries to ‘pump up the funk’.  Expect in the coming months many more members’ beers to be funky!!

And then there was September, the highlight of which was NCHF!!!  What, you ask, is NCHF?  Northern California Homebrewers’ Festival, also referred to as the best weekend all year!  Basically, it’s a weekend camping trip were the entire campsite is taken over by all the homebrew clubs from the Bay Area to the Oregon border.  Saturday, there’s a festival…a beer festival…where all the booths are other homebrew clubs!  A dinner by the Homebrew Chef, Sean Paxton; talks by notable brewers; raffles sponsored by MoreBeer….and you only have to stumble back to your tent that night!!  Our club brought it this year, and purchased 9% of the total tickets for the festival!!!  Definitely a highlight of belonging to the club, and if you missed it this year, than you’d better make sure you join and get in the know for next year!!!

To help recover from this celebration, we decided to dial it back for our September general meeting; so we presented Barleywines!  Club member Schulyer Campbell presented on Barleywines as well as Old Ales, their differences, and notes on brewing them!  Again, the presentation was well received, and if you missed it, don’t worry, the presentation will be available online for dues paying members.

Still holding your attention??  Peaked your interest yet??  Ready to ‘jump in the wort’ as it were??  Well then, make sure you don’t miss out on the upcoming October General Meeting, when we’ll be presenting “Flavors and Off-Flavors”.  What’s that mean?!  It means that we’ll be serving you a bunch of Bud Light, intentionally dosed with flavors and smells (some desirable, some not so much), so that you can learn to recognize those same characteristics in your beers and more importantly, how to fix your process so you don’t keep getting them!!  It will be a very informative and interesting evening to be sure.  As always, we invite you to come out and see what the club, and more importantly, homebrewing, is all about!!!  See the calendar on the side bar (over there…look to your right) to make sure you don’t miss it!  Also, feel free to join our mailing list so as to get the most up to date information and start benefiting from the knowledge that our members disseminate to all who’ll listen!!  Have a question?  Feel free to ask!!  Want to know what good breweries you can expect to find on your next trip?  Again, throw out an email…most likely someone in the club knows where you can get a good beer in Hoxie, Kansas!!

We’ll see you at the next meeting!  Until then, Cheers!!

So, just stumbling across this page for the first time?  New to homebrewing or been thinking about getting into it?  Well, you’ve come to the right place!

Welcome to the home of the Greenbelt Brewers Association!  We are a homebrew club that focuses on building our collective knowledge about the hobby of homebrewing, enticing newbies into the hobby, and, well, we all seem not to mind tasting each other’s brews either!

If you haven’t been to one of our meetings before, please make sure that you come out and join us for our regular July meeting on Tuesday, July 19th, 2011.  We meet at the UC Davis Brewing classroom at Sudwerks Brewery, up above the Dock Store.  Our meeting starts at 7pm sharp, but we highly recommend that you get there between 6 and 6:30 to have a pint down at the Sudwerks Dock Store: help support the company that supports us (and really, do you need a reason to buy a beer?!)

What will this meeting be like, you ask?  This will be a very special meeting since we’ll be doing a Single Hop celebration!  14 members of the club all brewed the same recipe beer (grain bill, ibu’s, hop additions, etc), but each with a single different hop.  The entire meeting will be focused on tasting these hops and seeing the different aromas, flavors, and to some extent, bitterness characteristics as well.  What we feel will be an excellent addition to every level of homebrewer’s knowledge base!

We also highly encourage our members (and visitors…or as we like to say, future members) to bring out a bottle or two of their latest batch for evaluation and sharing as well.

And if we entice you enough that you’ll want to associate yourself with our mootly crew in the future, lucky for you that new members only have to pay a prorated membership fee of $10 for the rest of the year! (Good till Dec. 31; standard membership dues are $20 a year…..which is still a really good price when you think about it!)

Hope to see all you there!!  Questions can be emailed to the board at greenbeltboard@googlegroups.com

Cheers!

If you are a new homebrewer, a veteran brewer, or a member that missed the last general meeting this last Tuesday (May 17th, 2011), here’s what you missed:

First off, Blair Howard, our club’s Membership Coordinator, presented on the Wit/Wheat style of beer- a perfect brew for summertime!  Club members can access the presentation on the members’ website for reference.

We also discussed upcoming events, both public as well as club events.  One that is rapidly approaching is the Davis Beer Festival being held at Sudwerks on June 4th.  Come out and support the cause, and sample both professional brewers’ wares next to club members!  Also on the docket for this summer will be our first ever Davis Bike Pub Crawl (Sunday, June 19th) and our club’s first ever Family Picnic (Saturday, July 23rd).  More information on these two events will be forthcoming on the group’s email.  Not yet signed up for the email?  Do so either here, or by hitting the link on the sidebar.

We also have a new sponsor!  Club member Christian D’Souza has offered to support our club through his own company, BRUBAR Energy Bars.  For each 12 bar box purchased at the club meetings, for $20 a box, BRUBAR will donate $5 back to the club!  A win-win for all, and now you can have the great taste of a malty snack for breakfast!

Finally, we are undertaking a task that only the cooperation of a club can do:  explore the differences in taste, aroma, and bitterness that each hop variety lends to a beer by itself!  Club members will be brewing the same beer (same malt bill, yeast, OG, IBU’s, and yeast), but each will only use one variety of hop.  Sounds interesting??  Well, if you’ve been on the fence about coming out to the meetings, then make sure you hit the July one at least, so you can sample differences in hops and better your own recipe design capabilities.

If you are intrigued, perplexed, excited, curious, or just bored, make sure you come out and check out the next meeting.  Our next meeting will be Tuesday, June 21st at 6:30pm in the Classroom above Sudwerks Brewery (accessible through the Dock Store).  Hope to see you all there!  Cheers!

Congratulations are in order to club member Schuyler Campbell and club president John Sanatar for their third place award for their “Double Kitten IRA” (India Red Ale) entered in the Specialty Category at the 2011 Celebrewtion Homebrew Competition. The beer was inspired by a commercial beer in Oregon called Double Mountain IRA, a hop-dominated, dry ale, with a candy-sweet backbone from heaps of pilsner malt and Thomas Fawcett medium crystal malt.

The Specialty Category is one of the harder categories to do well in due to there usually being such a broad range of types of beers entered.  First and second this year, in the Specialty Category were a coffee oak stout and a black IPA, respectively. This year, Celebrewtion had 127 entries from all over Northern California.  The competition is hosted by the Gold Country Brewers Association a homebrew club based in Sacramento and the judging took place on March 19th.  Complete list of the results can be found here.

Welcome to those of you that are just stumbling across our club’s website after possibly finding out about us at one of the many events the Greenbelt Brewers Association took part in this last week!  It seems that from the feedback we are all hearing from club members, the week was certainly a success!

We know for a fact that several events went extremely well!  Here are some of the events that the club took part in:

To kick off the week, there was an opening night gala, graciously hosted by the newly remodeled Crocker Art Museum.  The event took place on Thursday, Feb. 24th from 5pm-9pm.  The party was outstanding!  Many local breweries came out to pour their fine brews at the event, ranging everything from Sierra Nevada’s Sloughhouse Ale (a Sac Beer Week exclusive), to the newer brewery, Knee Deep (whom, if you haven’t had it yet, makes an excellent Vanilla Porter!)  The crowd was a tremendous mix of all us beer nerds, to notaries such as Dr. Bamforth (of UCD), to white-collar crowd fresh in out of the rain after a hard day breaking stones for the state.  At last count, there was over 700 attendees!  Again, a big thanks goes to the Crocker!

A few days later, on Saturday, Feb. 26th, the Greenbelt group lead our first event:  an East Sacramento Bike Pub Crawl!  The crawl was extremely well attended, as we roped in a good number of future GBA’ers into the event.  Traveling from Hot City Pizza, to The Shack, and finally to Pangea, we were well received at all locations; a huge thanks goes out to the owners of those fine establishments!  (In addition to our web thanks, they probably wouldn’t mind you mentioning another thank you next time you are there enjoying a pint! hint hint)

Following the Pub Crawl, the GBA held a Brew Demonstration on Sunday, Feb. 27th, along with fellow brewers at Elk Grove Brewers Guild at the newest Sacramento area homebrew shop, BFD.  The event exhibited two GBA systems, an extract brew as well as an all-grain, to best show the two ends of the scale of homebrewing systems.  It was a great day weather wise, and we saw many people who came by and asked questions, soon left BFD with arms full of gear.  Hope to see those new brewers at upcoming meetings!  We even had the press out there, with a short segment on News 10, as well as this article in the Elk Grove Citizen.  Pics of the day can be found here.

And to top off the week, the GBA was one of only two homebrew clubs invited to pour our humble brews side-by-side with the big guys at the Capital Brew Fest at CalExpo (held Saturday, March 5th).  An “awesome event” doesn’t even begin to describe how well received this event truly was, and with over 70 professional breweries in attendance, we not only got excellent kudos from the many hordes of beer connoisseurs, but our President John Sanatar and Event Coordinator Steve Katz were the photo op for the San Francisco Examiner, and we got another pic of Treasurer Josh Hughes, Steve Katz, and Secretary Matt Boyer in the blog Flabmag.com (as well as a nod to our beer, “Big Breasted Mild”!)  The event was excellent, and we blew through 30 gallons of homebrew with numerous people asking time and time again where they could purchase our beers!  The answer that this was brewed in garages from the Sierras to the Bay Area Foothills was met with utter amazement.  A better send of to Sac Beer Week, we could not have had!

Hope to see you all at this coming meeting, Tuesday, March 15th, 6:30pm at Sudwerks!  More lively recapping is definitely on the agenda!  Cheers!

If you are a new homebrewer, a veteran brewer, or a member that missed the last general meeting this last Tuesday (February 15th, 2011), here’s what you missed:

First off, SACRAMENTO BEER WEEK is kicking off!  For those of you who may not be familiar with this, Sacramento will be celebrating its second annual Beer Week, kicking off this Thursday with a Gala at the Crocker with local pro-brewers, and ending with a large California Brewers’ Festival at CalExpo on Saturday, March 5th.  More information can be found at sacramentobeerweek.com.  More importantly, Greenbelt Brewers will be involved in several of the festivities, including a Bike Pub Crawl, a Teach a Friend to Brew Day, as well as pouring at the CalExpo fest.  More information can be found on this page below.

After the discussion of the upcoming festivities, the club was presented with an excellent introduction to the art and science of ‘mashing’ by our resident brewer, Dave Bosworth.  He covered the theory, the process, and discussed the differences in sparging techniques and effects of temperature on final beer.  The presentation was well received and helped take some of the ‘black magic’ out of moving to all-grain.

Again, if you missed out, try not to next month when we meet at Sudwerks Brewery at 6:30pm on March 15th.  All levels of brewers are welcome to attend- you just have to be willing to sit around, talk and imbibe in homebrew!  Cheers!

Event: Learn How to Brew Day
Location: BFD, 3527 Broadway Sacramento, CA
When: Sunday Feb 27 from 10-4 pm

The GBA will be co-hosting a how to brew demo day at BFD with the Elk Groove Brewers Guild.  We will be brewing an extract batch of stout and an all grain batch of IPA on two different brew systems. The EGBG will also have several brew systems on the go including a 15 gallon automated system.  This is the event to go to if you want to learn more about how to brew beer.  It is also a great event for those who have never brewed before.  Please forward this announcement along to all your friends who are interested in learning how to brew.  We will be pouring homebrew at the event and there will be food available for purchase as well from the BFD.  Best of all the event is free!  Hope you all can make it!