Registration is now open for the Nordeast Brewers Alliance Homebrew Competition 2021! Create or update your account now with entry registration open November 1 – 30. Judging will be 100% remote, so check the competition site for more details.
Cheers — and good luck!
Looking back, February 2020 turned out to be a poor time for a post about all the in-person events that we do. Now in Summer 2021, we are getting events back on the calendar, so that article is important again. From taproom visits to education deep-dives and social events, the club has a lot going on throughout the year.
There are two great times to meet up with us to learn more or join the club:
We welcome everyone regardless of experience or skill to join the club and take part in whatever events are most interesting. Check out the club calendar to see where we will be and feel free to contact us if you have any questions. Updates are also available on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
After more than a year of the club being separated during COVID with only access through video chats and email, our friends at Rahr Malting and BSG Handcraft were able to help with a virtual brew day in April 2021. We collaborated on a couple recipes — a pale ale featuring Leopold Bros. pale malt, Chinook hops, and US-05 American yeast and a Kolsch-style with Rahr North Star Pils malt, Mt. Hood hops, and German K97 yeast — and bagged them up for club members to pick up in five-gallon kits.
Many members logged into a video chat during brew day so we could brew together… apart. It was an interesting experience with friends over in the corner during a normally solo brew day, but the company was great on one of the first nice weekends of the year.
Photo by Aaron D
With a variety of brewing kits, it was fun to travel through virtual brewery tours to see what others are doing. Some of the best knowledge I have picked up since joining the BSG club has been at group brew days and brewing with other people. It is amazing how obvious some techniques are once they are seen in-person from another brewer.
Photos by Aaron D, Tyler B, Nick M, and Jason B
The beers, of course, came out great! With these great ingredients comes great beer. Aaron D. reported that his Leopold Chinook Pale Ale was the best beer of that style he has brewed. Although most brewers with the Kolsch-style kit got higher efficiency than expected, that could mean the beer is just kicked up a notch to a Blonde Ale or Session Pale. Regardless, beer is beer.
Photos by Mike C (shaker pint, Leopole Chinook pale ale) and Jason B (tulip, Kolsch-style)
At a recent meeting, the monthly education topic focused on the different products available for cleaning our equipment and brew spaces. Jump in to see what we found for best practices and what works best in different situations.
Our club focuses on a different education or experimentation topic at our meetings on the Third Thursday of each month. We have some interesting topics coming up in 2021, including:
Our goal is to be inclusive of all levels of brewer from someone on their first batches or award-winning brewers with decades of experience. All are welcome to join and learn.
Over the past six months I am sure everyone has felt that we are living in sour times, so this year the NBA homebrew competition is embracing that fully. We are putting on an event smaller than previous years and will focus exclusively on sour, wild, and funky beers. This includes European (Berliner, Flanders, Oud Bruin, Lambic, Geuze), American (Brett, Mixed Ferm, Wild), Historical (Gose, Lichtenhainer), and Local styles (Catharina) following BJCP style guidelines.
Account registration is NOW OPEN with entry registration and drop-off/shipping capped at 50 entries due in November. All judging will be done through remote video chat, so THREE BOTTLES OF EACH ENTRY are required. Check out the competition website for full details. Register early and get your entries submitted!
If you have a taste for these styles, we are looking for judging volunteers for this BJCP-certified event. Pick-up will be made available in the Minneapolis area in early December.
Please reach out with any questions about entries or to help judge!
Cheers!
The barrel program for sour and whiskey-aged beers is a core tenet of the NBA club. With some changes over the past months to our barrel line-up, the history and goals have been updated on the Barrel Program page. Come check out what we are up to.
Membership is open to everyone, which includes access to the barrel program.
Cheers!
What a strange year this has been. The club has not had formal in-person events since our monthly meeting in February, but we have been keeping connected. The Taproom Takeover events and monthly meetings have become online video chats and beer sharing has been quite limited. We did put together an exchange where members dropped off a six-pack at a central hub, which were then sorted into variety packs to pick up the next day. Keeping socially distant has really changed how our club operates, but we can still stay connected virtually.
There have been a few upgrades this summer to the club brew system as well. Club member TJ shared his excellent welding skills to put together a new burner frame for the club system. This new system is still made of mild steel, but is designed to be a bit taller and sized to fit the current 30-gallon kettle and mash tun as well as possible 50-gallon kettles if needed in the future. Getting some new Blichmann burners from our friends at Midwest Supplies — a huge Hellfire and a standard banjo-style — the new system feels more solid for huge batches.
The club also made some changes in the Barrel Program. One of the Flanders-style sour barrels turned into 60 gallons of salad dressing (very vinegar and undrinkable), so it was dumped and the barrel is being decommissioned. To keep the program going, a new Silver Oak Cellars Cabernet barrel replaced that in June with a few club officers brewing up the beer to fill that and get it back in cycle. A twin barrel was also part of that order and filled with acid wash to get beer around the new year to keep them on separate fill cycles. A third barrel was also ordered at the same time as another addition to the program: a La Crema Chardonnay barrel. This was filled with pale sour base beer to become the new club solera. Ideally this will become sour and drinkable in the next 18 months where one-third will be removed (and fruited and bottled for club members) and filled again with fresh, clean beer. Keep an eye out for an update to the Barrel Program page real soon for an update on the barrel inventory, the beers that are in-flight, and the plans going forward.
Last, and certainly not least, the campaign for the Nordeast Brewers Alliance Food Drive for ESNS was a great success! We met our goal of $1000 raised for this great organization to support their services, especially the metro food programs. With the NBA summer party being cancelled this year, we had to also cancel the food drive. We will continue our efforts of supporting our home base hosts as we all work through these tough times together.
If you are looking for a club to increase beer and brewing knowledge, meet up with others interested in the brewing process, or want to share your own knowledge, please feel free to reach out to the NBA Operations mailbox. In addition to two meet-ups each month (albeit virtual right now), we have a bunch of regular events on the calendar. Check out the club calendar to see where we will be and feel free to contact us if you have any questions. Updates are also available on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Cheers!
NBA is running a food drive to support ESNS. In these tough times, community support is even more important and our friends at East Side Neighborhood Services are working every day with less support available than normal. As our home base for club meetings in Northeast Minneapolis, we drive to keep ESNS support available for the entirety of Hennepin county with myriad education, social, and support functions.
Between now and Sunday, July 19, we are driving to raise $1000 in support of ESNS through the link below.
GoFundMe: Nordeast Brewers Alliance Food Drive for ESNS
In about THREE MINUTES you can help our community:
(a) Follow the GoFundMe link to donate as appropriate to your situation. Cash goes a long way to help support a food bank as they buy just-in-time supplies to support the community.
(b) Share this post on social media to get the word out. Getting the word out to find a few more supporters will help us exceed our goal.
Thank you for your support! Together we can keep everyone safe!
Education is one of the key tenets of the NBA club, so each month at the regular meeting we have a topic around education, experimentation, DIY projects, guest speakers, or other topics to expand our knowledge around ingredients, equipment, process, and more.
Over the years there have been TWO topics on Mild as an underappreciated style — A History of Mild and May is Mild Month. The ‘Explore A Style’ months are usually accompanied with homebrew and commercial examples to sample during the presentation — and it is clear that any style can vary greatly, even if from the same recipe.
That ties in with experiments like Same Recipe, Different Brewers where no two of a variety of batches seemed like the same beer at all. This is different than the Single Hop Experiment and Yeast variety experiments.
Many of these beers are brewed on systems built by the members themselves, including Dual Stage Temp Controller and creating shortcuts with Carboy Hacks.
Every month is something different with big plans penciled in for the next months and beyond. Check out the Education & Experiment menu at the top of the page here to see what else we have been up to. Do you have a topic you would like to present to the club? We are always looking for more!
Cheers!
The March monthly NBA meeting is cancelled. In the interest of safety and precaution to prevent the spread of COVID-19, we will not be meeting this month and the Cask Ale education topic will be moved to another time. Wash your hands, your beer glasses, and your carboys. We hope to see you in April back at ESNS to talk about Maibock.
Check the NBA Calendar for upcoming events.
Cheers!