Here is a yearly wrap up we submitted ...


 

Washington Spirit of Homebrewing Club of the Year Summary

 




 

Section 1: Club Introduction

 

The Impaling Alers are one of the oldest clubs in the state and have a little over 200 members with approximately 35-45 members showing up at monthly meetings. The Alers have new brewers, old brewers, extract brewers, all grain brewers and everything from beer to mead to cider to wine is fermented and enjoyed as a club. Meetings cover regular business (finances, upcoming events, club business), an educational topic, as well as a style education from the “Style Sherpa”. After the formal meeting, an informal tasting with members sampling example beers from the education/style focus as well as each other’s goodies. This is the time where new brewers meet up with experienced members and judges for feedback. There are 3 meetings that are social potlucks to foster community and draw new members.

 

 

 

Section 2: Club Vision

 

We don't brew because we have to, we brew because we love to. We want to share our knowledge and our brew with others, which is why we have 19 active BJCP members. We love to learn about all aspects of brewing. The Alers passion is to make everyone in the club a better brewer, an educated beer lover, and to enjoy fermenting all things. The Alers seek to grow the club and promote craft beer culture at regularly scheduled meetings and potlucks as the substrate to foster growth in brewing by encouraging new ingredients/styles/techniques/equipment/attitude/friendships. That is augmented with organizing brewing related events to draw more people into the brewing community. This is all done while having the most fun humanly possible.

 

Section 3: Club Accomplishments

 

1. Encouraging people to brew. Yeah, crazy, right? The Alers want people learn about brewing by doing! The Alers have several Iron Brewer competitions throughout the year to encourage thoughtful recipe formulation by assigning challenging ingredients to the participants. The resultant brew is brought for everyone to share and the brewers share what they did and what they though went well (or not so well occasionally). We host a “Share the Wort” event with Big Al's, where Big Al brews the wort and everyone is encouraged to take the wort and make a different beer and then bring it back to the club to share. The Alers promote competitions in WA and OR and encourage members to brew and enter. The Alers have partnered with Rogue and the Issaquah Brewhouse to have members brew on their nano system. This is an opportunity to brew with a slightly bigger system than most homebrewers have and to enjoy having your beer served at a pub. The old adage, “it takes just as long to brew N*5 gallons as 5 gallons” is a good one. So the club has invested in a barrel and half brew system (fermenters not yet included) for members to brew on and learn to scale up their recipes and have more beer to share with the club and personal events like weddings, birthdays and holidays. The Alers like to experiment! We brewed the same wort on a big system and then fermented it with six different yeast to see the different characters. We then charted that and brought it to NHC. Experimental hops? Bring 'em to the Alers. We brewed wort on a big system and then used different experimental hops to showcase their flavor. That beer also went to NHC. And then later in the year some more experimental hops came the Aler way to brew (my personal fav was 0027-036).

 

2.) Encouraging learning about brewing. The club has had a couple of malt tasting experiments as part of club meetings. Club members teach brewing classes at Larry's. We had lectures and live brewing at the Enumclaw Oktobeerfest. The Style Sherpa teaches regularly about tasting and brewing styles. We help with Pro-Am, NHC (bottle sort, organizing committee, WaHa tasting beer, poster sessions, judging, enjoying) and we host Novembeerfest, Oktobeerfest. National Homebrew day is huge with Alers and we always log at least 200 gallons,