Happy New Year, friends and folks! 2022 will be a great year for the NBA and we are starting off with a bunch of great topics. Let’s jump in and recap the recent goings-on!

The Winter Party held a couple things going on:

• Officer Elections
  • President Aaron D was re-elected for another term in that role. The club will surely continue to flourish under his leadership.
  • Director of Operations Steve M stepped down from re-election for his role. We greatly appreciate the work he has done in this position and will surely benefit from other projects and events where he will provide his expert insight.
  • Jim I was elected to the Director of Operations role. He has some ideas for the membership and event committees under the purview of this position.
• Club High Gravity Competition
  • The meeting also included the informal competition for beers ≥8% brewed in 2021. Congratulations to Matt J for winning with his Coffee Stout.
  • Honorable mentions to Jim I for his DIPA and Al S for his Bitter Stout.
  • All five entries were solid beers!

For club business, there are a few things going on:

• Merchandise
  • Stacking taster glasses are available at $4/one, $7/two, $12/four
  • Jim I is researching a site that sells branded hoodies, shirts, etc.; keep an eye out
• January, February, and March meetings this year will be held at ESNS as they are not running their tax prep course this year. Keep an eye on the Club Calendar for upcoming meeting and event locations.
• 2022 membership renewal is due in January for all members. Please submit $20 through PayPal to nba.treasury@gmail.com with your name and email or visit the Join or Renew Today page on the website.
  • Check with a member of the leadership committee for your 2022 membership card.
  • Members renewing (or joining!) by January 31 will also receive bottles from the first pull from the club solera — a straight pale sour and peach pale sour. I assure you they are wonderful bottles. Pick-up or coordination is required by the February meeting.
• There are a couple relatively minor changes to the club by-laws
  • Members joining between July 1 and October 31 receive a 50% discount ($10 instead of $20 for 2022). Members joining between November 1 and December 31 will pay the full annual membership fee good through the following calendar year. These changes are effective 01/01/2022.
  • Check out the Club By-Laws page on the website for full, official details.
• Nick M is coordinating club bike rides throughout 2022. Members can check out the thread in the Google Group email for more details. Expect 3-4 rides during the summer and one in the fall for an Oktoberfest tour. The rides will focus on enjoying the beer and biking slowly.
• HomebrewCon 2022 is scheduled for June 23-35 in Pittsburgh. If there is enough interest, there will be an NBA AirBNB to save on lodging and transportation.
• A few barrel transfers are planned for the next few months:
  • The George Dickel barrel Dark Sour will be transferred and refilled in early February.
  • One of the French Oak Lambic-style barrels will follow around February/March.
  • The Rittenhouse Rye Stout will be swapped around March/April.
  • Members should keep an eye out for emails to sign up for these barrels over the next couple months.
• Over the next couple months we have a couple great education topics planned:
  • In February we will have a guest speaker from Lallemand to talk about their yeast.
  • The March meeting lands on St. Patrick’s Day, so we should talk about Irish beer styles. We are looking for a volunteer to facilitate this meeting and for members to brew Irish dry stout, Irish red, and export stout to drink during the meeting.

All are welcome to join the club! Please follow us on this blog, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for updates. The Club Calendar also shows our upcoming meetings and events. The club benefits everyone from new brewers starting a first batch to seasoned veterans looking to hone their skills and get feedback on new styles and techniques. Feel free to drop by a Taproom Takeover social hour or stop by a meeting any time to check us out first.

Cheers! 🍻

This month the education topic at the club meeting will be on the NBA Solera Program. This is part of the overall NBA Barrel Program and run by the Leadership Committee. The overall goal is to create a consistent and regular source of distinct and wonderful sour beer sponsored by the club for the members to enjoy.

There is a bit of planning and maintenance in this program, so come by the meeting on Thursday, January 20 7-9pm at East Side Neighborhood Services to learn more — and have a sample of the first pull from this barrel!

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:

• First Thursday: Taproom Takeover social hour. Watch the club calendar to see where we will be. Find the table with a bunch of brewers wearing our logo and say hello!
• Third Thursday: Monthly meeting and education/experimentation topic. Back at East Side Neighborhood Services in Northeast Minneapolis starting with the July meeting, come share some homebrew if you have it — or at least bring tasting glasses to sample offerings from others.

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. 

The education topic for May’s meeting covered Traditional Farmhouse Brewing and novel Farmhouse yeasts, including Kveik.  The presentation largely covered what is written in the book “Historical Brewing Techniques: The Lost Art of Farmhouse Brewing” by Lars Marius Garshol.  We discussed the history and methods of historical farmhouse brewing, along with contemporary brewers that continue to use the same traditional equipment, ingredients and techniques to brew interesting beers.  We also dug into the unique ingredients used in these beers, including juniper, farmhouse yeast known as “Kveik”, and smoked malts.

Along with the education topic, we shared 6 different regional “styles” of farmhouse beer brewed by four members of the club.  These included a raw “Kornøl”, boiled Heimabrygg, and smoked “Stjørdalsøl” from different regions of Norway, and a Swedish Gotlandsdricke.  All four used common juniper, and were fermented with different Kveik strains and cultures.  A Lithuanian “Kaimiškas” ale and a “Minnesota Farmhouse Ale” (using red cedar in place of common juniper) were also brewed to accompany the presentation.  Tasting the beers generated a lot of discussion, but all were delicious and distinctive. The Minnesota Farmhouse Ale brewed by Brady was a real standout!

The smoked malts used in the Gotlandsdricke and Stjørdalsøl were donated by Sugar Creek Malt for our club’s education topic and example beers.  Based in Indiana, this maltster stands apart from others by producing unique smoked malts.  The malts used for these beers are smoked on a wood-fired Nordic-style Såinnhus kiln.  These malts helped create a beer with a depth of flavor that is similar to the historical beers they were intended to recreate. Skål!

All the recipes for the beers we brewed can be found on the Brewfather library @nordeast.brewers.alliance

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:

• Explore a Style: Maibock
• Historical Farmhouse Beers: Kviek and Beyond
• CO2 capture (Theory and Practice)

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!

SourTimesNBA.com

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!