February Meeting Minutes

Great brew today at Slack's house. Two extract batches of 3 Lions, and a supplement boil for Ian's stout. Good times.  Meeting minutes below. Dues vote to be up soon.  Safe travels Boddy. God Speed.

BaltiBrew Meeting 2/3/11 – Minutes  Meeting start time:  8:30pm

Attendees:  Ryan Boddy, Kevin Berry, Greg Slack, John Jester, Dan Lagasse, Ben Atwood, Matt McCann

Agenda:  Saturday’s Brew, Dues conversation, Meeting attendance, purchasing rentable brewing kits,

Saturdays Brew:

We are going to clone 3 Lions as part of the Oliver Ale Pratt Street Ale House clone competition.  There was a kickoff clone war event at PSA earlier this week, which a few club members attended.  So at Greg Slacks house, we are going to brew an extract batch of 3 Lions, and an all grain batch of 3 Lions.  We will be submitting 4 different versions to the PSA competition.  Submission deadline is March 11^th.  The consensus from the group in attendance at this meeting is that we love 3 Lions beer, and we’re excited to clone it and enter it in competition.  Kevin will arrive to Greg’s at 8:30 to unload equipment and start the all-grain set up.  Ryan and Greg are getting ingredients for the extract brew tomorrow (Friday 2/3).  Kevin has all ingredients necessary for the all grain versions.  BRING FOOD.  Weyerbacher wheat wine 10% will be served at the brew, along with several other artisan beers.  We will hold a tasting of all four versions at our March meeting.

Dues:

What is the amount going to be?  5, 10, 20, 25?

Per year Includes 10% discount to brew shops in MD, you get to vote, you get to drink on club beer at brews and potentially at meetings, access to rental brewing equipment, mentor answers to your brewing and beer questions, members only parties, exclusive brewery tours, access to club member recipes, member only brew events, member deals at bars, club identification, reimbursement for passing the BJCP test, and potentially club tchotchke.

Movement for $20 2nded.  Discussing 10, 25, etc.  Keep going back to $20.  We are going to hold the vote online.  We are discussing what due amounts to take to vote.  We are going to bring 3 numbers to vote.  The three increments are $15, $20, and $25.  Charging dues is a big change for our club.  We are all on board.  Note:  This will be your last chance to vote on a club issue as a non-dues paying member.  Once this vote is tallied, dues will be due at our next meeting.  Dues are annual, and will expire January 1^st of the following year.  Polls will be opened tomorrow and will stay open until the last Thursday 2/24 in February.   For members who join after June, we will prorate the dues to half of the annual amount.  Members who join in December will pay full amount but won’t have to pay again in January.

There are currently 67 people on our mailing list.

Meeting attendance:

Notification if you aren’t going to be attending a meeting?  NO, not necessary.  Correlates with the reason why we don’t have a club president.   So why come to meetings?  Kevin made it simple:  “You get to drink our beer!”  The big issue is if you want your business dealt with, show up to the meeting.

Low attendance this week because of late meeting last month, and a brew on Saturday.  Winter, busy with holidays, we get it.

Kits and capacity expansion:

Which direction do we want to go?  How many additional kits do we get?  Does this depend on how much dues we get?  A kit will be a bottling bucket, fermenting vessel (not glass), a lid, an airlock, bottling syphon, capper, rack and cane, thermometer, etc.

“Brewers best beer starter kit basic” similar to the one linked below.

http://www.annapolishomebrew.com/shopstartkitbeer.asp - less than $75 per kit.

We still need to work out how we are going to take beer home with us as members at club brews.

Do we need to worry more about more club volume, or getting people interested in brewing beer themselves?

Consensus is that we need to collect dues to see how to best address this issue.

Importantly, what we do with our cash is to be discussed as a group.

Special event coming up in March:

Ben (Severna Park club member) has proposed a casual event in March to be at his house.  He has 2 50gallon barrels of beer, and tons of artisan beer on at all times.  This will be in addition to our regular monthly meeting.  Ben will decide the date that works best for him.

April brew:

Possibly with a guest brewer?  Brian Strumky from Stillwater ales.  We need to lock down a date to have him.  Ian would like to have an April chilibrew 4/17.  We should cater to Brian.  We should welcome his involvement.  Brian is a Saison specialist, so the April brew is going to be Saison.

Easter is the 24^th of April.

Recruitment/Member Drive:

Should we currently be pushing for new members?  No.  Until we can see what kind of dues we can generate, and what we want to due with the cash, social conversations and hobby likenesses should be the only form of recruitment.

Site Access:

What kind of access do we give?  How will we handle recipes posts?  Adding members to the account?  Secretary to print list of all club members to check off meeting attendance.  Meeting attendees that could be potential members can provide email address at meetings.  We will determine web access upon dues payments.

Meeting adjourned 9:31pm 2/3/11