Home brew club events. Ideas, and what does your club do?

[OpenSights]

My HBC was based out of our LHBS who closed. So after 23 years we’re kind of in limbo. We lost one event location because of the closing, but we’re not going away. Our club is based on education, honing skill and obviously friendship. We’re now bouncing around for meetings between former members breweries and our last LHBS in the area. We share it with another club now, but Location wise has eliminated our “Iron Brewer” event. Much like the food network show, we had teams that had to brew a beer with a secret ingredient. Last year was carrot, tough, my team won, but I liked a different team’s beer better. Other past competition secret ingredients have been anything from jolly ranchers to mushroom....

We have an event twice a year called “firebrew”. We have a 7 barrel system that was once boiled over a huge fire pit, but now we use propane. (Nice to have member who’s family owns a propane company. $10 for a 20# exchange. I have 2 of those and a 30# and 40#, might be getting a 100#. Yes, I’m a gear junkie.)

We have the beer of the month. Start with a commercial control or two then members beers. Followed by questions and critic if requested, same goes for non month beer that someone brings.

Three times a year we have a competition beer, beer of the month. Winner gets a prize. I won the last one by default, (thanks to @Yooper ‘s oatmeal stout recipe! First AG where I hit my numbers almost exactly! Thanks again Yooper!) but many members said they liked my oatmeal stout over Shorts.

Many times, outside of official club business we have group brew days.

Wondering if your club does anything different. Board meeting is Tuesday and I have a few things to propose. One is a multi club competition at Big Buck Brewery in Gaylord Michigan. I stopped in this last week, got to meet the head brewer and got a tour of their 15 barrel system. The plan is for clubs to enter the specified beer and he’ll brew it on his nano system, can half for the winning club and put the other on tap and name it after the club.

Wondering about any ideas to present to the board that your club might do.

With the loss of our “home base” has all of us scrambling to come up with ideas, maybe just one or two to help keep members involved and be more active. BTW, my position on the board is membership.... so this is a personal thing as much as a club question.

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

 

[Bamos6928]

The most fun thing our club does is a fantasy draft beer competition. It works just like fantasy football but you draft ingredients like you would draft players. Once someone drafts an ingredient no one else can use that in their beer. We have other competitions throughout the year to earn points which determines draft order.