Lawrence Brewers Guild

Seminar
Chuck Ferguson and Lee Meisel brought in a few pieces of brew equipment. There was a keggle hot liquor tank with a built-in HERMS (read about heat exchangers here), a Gott cooler mash tun with false bottoms, inline house water filter and a DIY stir plate spinning some water.

Thanks Chuck and Lee for brining them in and answering questions about them.

Tasting
The tasting this month was meads. Click Here for the BJCP Style Guidelines. A mead is a honey wine.The meads were provided by Lee Meisel, John Monoghan, Bill (Mr Blues in the forums) and Matt Bechtold.

First mead was a ginger braggot from Bill (Mr. Blues)
Second mead was a wildflower braggot made by Lee Meisel
Third mead was an apple blossom made by John Monoghan.
Forth mead was a 3 year old oak aged orange blossom mead also by John Monoghan.
Fifth mead was a commercial mead by [please remind me the name]

Thanks for the donations for the tastings gentlemen! To read about meads at Brewiki.com Click Here and at Wikipedia.com Click Here.

Announcements
President Sean Belden started the meeting by announcing that this would be his last meeting as president. He gave a run down of all the pain in the butt stuff he made us do and what good it?s done for the guild. All kidding aside, thanks Sean for your two years of leadership and support.

Sean asked if anyone wanted to step up and go against the current nominations. Chuck Ferguson for President, Shane Lynn for Vice President, Xan Wedel for Treasurer, Bill Carruth for Secretary and Matt Bechtold for Biermeister. No one stood up, so let's welcome in our 2008 Officers! Congratulations all and here's to another great year with the LBG!

Sean hands the leadership and control of the meeting over to Chuck. Jeff Jensen speaks up and offers many compliments and states ?it?s been a great ride? and starts a round of applause while Sean takes a seat and Chuck steps up. Libations were raised and drank.

Chuck takes over, and welcomes all the new faces. Good luck as our new President Chuck!

VP Shane introduced himself and also offered his time to help anyone wanting to learn or needing some help with their beers or brewing process.

It was announced that the LBG will start paying for the Unitarian Fellowship's Curbside Recycling. Check out www.clokansas.org

Recognition
The LBG showed their brewing might in the 25th Kansas City Bier Meisters Competition.
2008 Medal winners:
Andy Booth:
Gold- American IPA
Gold- Belgian Specialty
Silver- North German Altbier

Shane Lynn:
Gold- Wood Aged Beer
Gold-Spice, Herb or Vegetable (Peppered Mexican Lager)

Chuck Ferguson:
Gold- Scotch 70 shilling Heavy
Bronze- Old Ale

That's a pretty strong showing! Congratulations Andy, Shane and Chuck!

Old Business

2007 Brewer of the Year
Andy Booth spoke up and suggested that we vote on the 2007 Brewer of the Year. Andy was voted the 2006 Brewer of the Year and may have to relinquish his trophy tap handle.
Jeff Jensen suggested that the award be presented at Maifest.

Treasury Report
$4100.00 announced

New Business

Club Brew
New VP Shane brought up that he wants to push a club brew this year. Using the equipment out at Andy's we can do a nice club brew. Sounds like we need to start on the details and get things rolling.

Maifest
When: Saturday, May 10th. 10am - Till
Where: Bloomington West Campground
Driving Directions from Lawrence.
Large Area Map -> http://tinyurl.com/eted7
Detail Map -> http://lawrencebrewers.org/gfx/bf2k4map2.jpg

Maifest is going to be the second weekend in May. We are going to need to get some committees going on this. Volunteers?
Where do we stand on the glasses? Is Barry going to offer up the art again this year?
Remember, this is not Brewfest, this is a club-only gathering.

Club Trip
Shane wants to get a group of people and go to Tall Grass. Tall Grass is a brewery in Manhattan. Maybe we could schedule a tour and go down and call it a night out.


memberships.
To pay your membership dues you can write a check to The Lawrence Brewers Guild and get it to our new Treasurer Xan Wedel
$16 for a single membership
$24 for a family membership
This year we will have laminated membership cards- courtesy of Zach Staats. He was going around the meeting gathering names and signatures for the cards, so to get your card, you need to get into contact with Zach so we can get your card completed.

Bulk Grain Buy
Andy announced that both pallets are full and requests that everyone needs to go to the forums and verify their order.
Bulk Buy Grain Thread
Please pay up in the next 2 weeks. We won't order the grain until all of the money is in. Please don't be 'that guy'.
It was proposed that anyone that doesn?t pay stands the chance of losing their sacks. The guild (or others) will pick up the extra sacks.

Odds & Ends

New Faces I always slaughter names in this section so forgive me.
Trisha, came w/ her husband.
Lindsay, his wife and her friend. Showed up to have fun.
Jack - here for the grain discounts
Lisa- Friend of Sean's, wants to learn to brew
Matt, works with Josh and his neighbor.

Clean up
John, Victor and several others that I did not get the names of. My apologies.

Bill wrote:Tasting
The tasting this month was meads. Click Here for the BJCP Style Guidelines. A mead is a honey wine.The meads were provided by Lee Meisel, John Monoghan, Bill (Mr Blues in the forums) and Matt Bechtold.

And one quick addendum: Jeff Jensen also provided two commercial mead offerings from Pirtle.

Bill wrote: First mead was a ginger braggot from Bill (Mr. Blues)
Second mead was a wildflower braggot made by Lee Meisel
Third mead was an apple blossom made by John Monoghan.
Forth mead was a 3 year old oak aged orange blossom mead also by John Monoghan.

The fifth was a mead of unknown honey varieties made by Bill (Mr. Blues). Perhaps he can chime in on the specifics -- it was very good IMHO, and quite a few others agreed.

The sixth was a commercial traditional using wildflower and clover honeys from Pirtle.

The seventh mead was an orange-blossom, wildflower and buckwheat honey blend by Matt Bechtold (with extra credit going to John Monaghan for his guidance and getting a new meadmaker started on Mead Day at his house two years ago.)

The eighth was a commercial effervescent mead also from Pirtle.

I may be a little off on the order there, but it's close. More important is that everyone gets credit where due, and there was a lot to go around.

Yes, we really had like eight different tastings and six of them were homebrewed. I am SO stoked that we had such an impressive showing from our members. Thank you very much for making my first tasting go so well.

Bill wrote: Thanks for the donations for the tastings gentlemen! To read about meads at Brewiki.com Click Here and at Wikipedia.com Click Here.

I'll second that! And if you'd like to show something off for next month's tasting, it's going to be Alts for April. Andy has already pledged some of his silver medal winning Northern German Alt, and maybe one other. Shane has already pledged one or maybe two others, possibly of the Dusseldorf variety, giving us a nicely rounded selection. A microbrew or commercial sample should round things out nicely, but if you have an Alt that you'd be willing to bring in April to share for the club tasting, please get in touch. The more homebrew the better!

And if you're worried that you can't contribute because you don't have the means to lager (myself included), don't... we'll do plenty of ales soon as well.

The Carta Blance bottles were a straight mead bottled in May of 1995. 1.5 gal. water, 10lbs. honey, 4 tsp. acid blend, 2 tsp. yeast nutrients, 1/2 tsp Irish Moss, 2 pkgs. Red Star Champagne yeast, 4.5 gal. batch

The Grolsch bottles were a braggot bottled in May of 1996.
6lbs. honey & enough water for slightly more than 2.5 gals., acid blend, yeast mutrients, Irish Moss, less than 1 oz. ground ginger, 1 oz Cascade hops, 1oz. Willamette hops, 1 pkg Champagne yeast, 2.5 gal. batch