Have you all seen this? Before I state my position, what do YOU think?
The board of directors of the Brewers Association, the 501(c)(6) parent organization of the American Homebrewers Association (AHA), recently met and approved a restated set of association bylaws. The existing bylaws were drafted last century, had undergone many amendments over the decades, and needed modernization to comply with current best practices.
A summary of substantive changes related to the AHA includes the following:
Board Size: The Brewers Association board size will be reduced to 18 beginning in February of 2024, then reduced again to 17 beginning with its first board meeting of 2025. This reduction puts the number of board members closer to (but still larger than) not-for-profit board size and will streamline decision-making
Packaging Brewers Designated Directors: beginning with the first board meeting of 2025, the maximum number of elected Packaging Brewer Members will be reduced from seven to six.
At-large Directors: beginning with the first board meeting of 2025, the maximum number of board-appointed, at-large directors will be reduced from five to four.
American Homebrewers Association Directors: effective with the first 2024 BA board meeting, the two AHA-designated directors will be eliminated.
The AHA Governing Committee has been renamed the AHA Committee and given the same standing committee status and governance structure as other BA committees. Its charters have been updated (view here).
As transition steps,
AHA Governing Committee chair and current AHA representative to the BA board, Shawna Cormier, was elected as an at-large director for a one-year term beginning February 14, 2024.
AHA Governing Committee representative Roxanne Westendorf will remain on the AHA Committee and end her term as BA Governance Committee chair and BA board member.
Current AHA Governing Committee members have been invited to serve on the AHA Committee, and the committee chair will appoint future members.
Active AHA members interested in participating in the new AHA committee can learn more here.
I have no idea of how the AHA and the Brewers Association interact and whether the proposed changes are good or bad. I do think that a board size of 18 is unwieldy.
It seems the BA continues to diminish the AHA. In this case they have stripped it of power within the larger organization. That concerns me because my dues go to AHA not BA.
I’ve been a member for ten plus years but had already decided not to renew my membership since the AHA isn’t really relevant to me any longer. This just reinforces that decision.
Downsizing in the 2020s is a thing everywhere and there is no avoiding it. That part is normal.
Stabbing yourself in the heart, however, goes beyond what is necessary to survive. They’re eliminating two positions. One might consider them heart and soul – no? However, I must also admit I have no idea what these people do day to day.
And this ^^. Why am I paying dues to the AHA if the BA is actually in control and could just drop the whole AHA at a whim in another couple years?
Dang, we should have seen this all coming when they dismissed Gary Glass a few years ago. What a boneheaded move THAT was, IMO. Now let’s add insult to injury.
That’s my take, without being an inside scooper. I’ll be very curious to hear Denny’s views.
Subscriptions are “pay for performance”. And I choose to have a limited budget for home brewing related subscriptions.
Quality content for home brewing beer from AHA was hit hard in 2020 & 2021. It may have stabilized (but at a much lower level) in 2023.
I understand the value of conferences (connections, not content) and will consider attending HomeBrew Con in the future as appropriate to my interests.
I’m not competition brewing at the moment. I have access to a couple of active home brew clubs for “tough love” feedback as well as a couple of regional competitions that these clubs organize. If/when I decide to “level up”, there’s the “Master Homebrewer program” to consider.
I am not sure what to think. I use this forum for the info given and received. I opted to join because I was grateful for the info and I get 10% off if I pick up items at my local Morebeer. Does this pay for the membership? Not really as I have most things shipped to me. I actually disabled my auto renew, but turned it back on. I might disable it again and make this a year to year decision. I don’t glean much from the magazine (to be honest, i don’t really read it as I opted for a print version that has not come to me in the last two or three issues). But, for me, the info I get here is worth the cost of the membership.
Sadly I have to say I am doing the same. I’ve already turned off the auto-renew function. I started doing a side by side comparison of Zymurgy magazine with BYO and Zymurgy consistently has far fewer articles that mean anything to me as a homebrewer. There have been issues within the past 12 months that, after thumbing through all the articles, I’ve immediately thrown in the trash within moments of bringing them in from the mailbox. That’s just sad and highly frustrating.
This seems to confirm my suspicions that I’ve had since Gary Glass’s position was eliminated. The AHA is becoming a mere footnote within the BA, and we should expect to see a continually diminishing role until it is possibly eliminated altogether. We just need to be wary of the motivations of the BA while they’re calling all the shots.
That being said, is there enough left in this hobby to support a full-time standalone organization that could stand on its own two feet without the BA supporting it? Because that’s really the only better alternative that I could picture - a separate organization from the BA. I just don’t see the current state of the hobby to be able to support something like that. Like it or not, this marriage of convenience is probably the best we got for the time being.
It isn’t surprising to me that the concerns of those who depend on the craft beer industry for their livelihood would be prioritized over the concerns of hobbyists.
Do the BA and the AHA even share the same goals? Every batch of beer I brew at home is 2 cases of (mostly SNPA) that I’m not purchasing.
I think there is, but the “aims” need to change I think. Back when I first joined, I worked on the 2001 AHA NHC here in Los Angeles. We were thrilled that we had 500 people attend the conference! We were hot s***. The conference and its expenditures were scaled appropriately to that level of participation. And then of course, over time, it grew and grew and grew. In part due to efforts of the AHA and in part due to the natural evolution in the hobby.
The conference went from being put together by a local committee with guidance from the AHA staff, to being run by the AHA staff, to being absorbed into the BA Event Planning staff (i.e. the same folks who run GABF and CBC). I think that worked well when the conference was banging out attendance in the multi-thousands, but now that conference participation is waning (and it’s not just a beer thing - it’s down across many hobbies/industries - I haven’t gone to a professional conference in years), I don’t think the BA staff is the right choice for running it. They aren’t setup to do “small”.
Ironically, it’s the same problem that big brewers faced around craft beer - they have the technical expertise to pull it off. ABI could make a dynamite {whatever style you could dream of}, but the people running the company would consider any beer brand that isn’t selling 100K+ barrels/year a failure.
I feel like the org needs to be allowed to pull back and get more loose and hippy dippy grass rootsy like it started. I don’t think these changes make moves in that direction.
I’m not in touch with the politics of the organization, but I would be very disappointed to see the AHA diminished. It was one of the sources I used when I first joined the hobby a few years ago. Supposedly, they’ve also been pushing for a lot of reforms and I’d really love to see shipping of beer open up from the current, ridiculous restrictions.
I also believe that brewing and purchasing of craft beer are not exclusive of each other. For example, a local brewery is very supportive of growing the hobby and is certainly taking a loss with the wort they’re “selling” in support of National Homebrew Day this year. (Last year’s was actually free, but he’s certainly not recouping his costs this year.)
BA and AHA should not be competitive with each other.
I understand the concept. The BA is an industry group that promotes the craft beer industry. For a while it made sense to have this small hobby as part of the fold expanding the scope of craft beer as a whole. There was alignment between expanding legal homebrewing, homebrewing as a pipeline into the industry and a built in consumer base for breweries. Now the industry is mature and well known. Homebrewing is legal everywhere (except certain parts of Alaska) and there isn’t all that much that aligns a hobby association to the industry group. It doesn’t entirely make sense to have hobbyists weighing into decisions that affect a $25 billion industry.
That said, this is a poor way to redefine the relationship. The AHA membership now has no real voice in the membership. The executive director is an employee of BA who is not subject to decision-making of the membership. The governing committee doesn’t govern and has no authority. The membership has no meaningful voice. The BA has been diminishing the organization as a whole for several years and now seems like an afterthought to the BA. HomebrewCon is now literally a slapped on sideshow to GABF. This was an opportunity to let the AHA stand with some independence as an organization that supports homebrewers, clubs and homebrew shops. Now it just seems like a marketing wing of BA to sell BP books and figure out how to make HombrewCon/NHC a profit center for BA.