Our club, Brew Free or Die, is looking to add more educational activities to our club life. The two options that are currently debated are having a short presentation at club meeting or having a dedicated meeting for brewer education.
The first option doesn’t give much time for educational topics since most of the meeting is for socializing and not everybody is interested in the educational part. The 2nd option is seen as running the risk of splitting the club since members may only attend one and not the other.
I’m the Tech Tsar for our club and we do it both ways, but usually at our regular meeting. The regular monthly meeting is where we exchange info on events and other things. The socializing happens after that part of the meeting. It can range from a presentation by me or another member to an open discussion of a topic to a “Tech Triva” thing with prizes. We also have a fair number of “meetings” that are strictly parties, so it’s not a big deal to have the regular monthly meeting devoted to info and technical stuff.
We try to have a presentation at every meeting. Doesn’t always work - have to have willing volunteers. Our presentations vary from style (what makes it unique, brewing/recipe considerations, tasting of examples), technical presentations on variety of brewing issues, regional presentations (when members travel somewhere & bring back examples to share), etc. We try to have beer to the lips as part of presentations as much as possible. We’re lucky enough to have a treasury that will support paying for beer for presentations.
As you mention, socializing & presentations don’t mix well. But we manage as best we can. Occasionally we’ll have separate presentations at another time/place… usually as part of a BJCP study group. We feel strongly that education is an important part of our mission as a club. It’s not always easy, but it is worth the effort & seems to be appreciated by a majority of our members (though not by everyone).
I’ve been thinking about this a lot as well as I face the fact that most of the people in my club are only interested in the social side.
I can think of a few cities where homebrewing is big that have basically ended up over the years with a serious club and a social club or two, maybe it happened the way you are saying. If you push too hard the people who don’t want the serious stuff will just leave. Maybe that is okay but having only been in my club (which is a very old one) a short time I don’t feel it is my place to set the tone.
I’ve thought about a BJCP judge type group in my town as these tend to be the people who are more serious and the BJCP members are split among the local clubs with some not being active in any club. I wouldn’t limit it to BJCP members but more target that as the initial membership and try to keep to focus limited so it doesn’t appear that we are trying to be a new full service club (no parties, no entering competitions under that groups name, etc).
My club (Hop Barley & the Alers) has it built into the meeting agenda. First we socialize while the dinner group is setting everything up. Then as we eat dinner, the President makes the announcements. Next, our VP gives a presentation of the style of the month. We split into our color groups to discuss responsibilities for the next meeting, and finally we have a speaker from the local area. The speaker is usually arranged by the President, and they speak on lots of technical topics. Our meetings are 7 to ~10 p.m. on the 4th Tuesday of the month. http://www.hopbarley.org/
janis’ club is way more organized than ours when it comes to meetings. In our club the club meeting is about the only time when brewers meet each other. We are also fairly far spread out with travel times ranging from 15 to 60 min.
Thanks, Janis. I was just picturing trying to do dinner for our club! We’ve had an explosion of members the last few years and our tech meetings are now over 60 in average attendance. Parties are too big to even guess!
Hi Kai,
My club has been around for a long time (late 1970s/early 1980s), and the basic meeting structure has evolved over that time. This is the Boulder County homebrew club, and our members have travel times very similar to yours.
Cheers,
Janis
Hi Denny,
As our club has grown, we have developed a color group system to ensure food, and beer, and set-up/clean-up are all a sure thing at each meeting. There are 4 color groups, Orange, Red, Green, and Blue. Each month one group has food responsibility, one has the beer style of the month, one has set-up/clean-up, and the 4th group has the month off. The responsibilities rotate so that the group responsible for beer gets the next month off. Color groups are assigned when you become a member, but they change at the beginning of each year when you renew your membership. This system was devised by Bob and Caroline Kauffman.
The cool thing is that the color group responsible for beer meets at one brewers house and they brew the beer. It’s an awesome way to expand your brewing knowledge and techniques. The club picks up the tab for ingredients for the brew, and also for the food for each meeting.
Our club holds a fundraiser auction every August to finance the rental of the hall for the meetings, and the food, and beer ingredients.
Our club, Hogtown Brewers in Gainesville FL, has about 100 members. Most meetings average 25-30 with a max of about 40. We meet at member’s homes, beginning each meeting with a pot-luck dinner. We haven’t had a problem yet, but have about maxed the possible size for meeting in members homes. Not sure where we’ll go if/when membership & meeting attendance grows beyond our current limitation.
Our meetings start with the potluck dinner, then we do Homebrew Show n Tell, then any necessary meeting business/announcements, followed by the presentation, and then just partying. We do the vast majority of club business at separate exec meetings (to which all members are welcome - though it’s usually the same group 10-12 comprised of the officers and the few others that carry the weight of making things happen. We went to this format a number of years ago because of lack of interest/attention of many members during the meetings. Partying is easy (beer, homebrewers, what else do you expect?), but the rest takes effort. So far our format has been working well, though some meetings do get a bit scattered during the presentation.
I wouldn’t mind moving to a model where there is some small presentation at each meeting and there are also more comprehensive technical meetings. Maybe the presentations can be a teaser for the technical meetings.
The club I belong to (River City Brewers in Monticello, MN) are fairly organized.
We are lucky enough to meet at River City Extreme Bowling, the first Monday of every month.
They don’t charge us for the use of a conference room, but we all order food & beverages from them, throughout our meetings.
From 6:00-6:30 is social/eating/drinking time…Then, we call the meeting to order…Discuss business…Have an assigned presentation or 2 by members…Discuss more business & future plans…Then, we have a tasting session of beer &/or wine.
Meetings typically go until 9:00 or 10:00.
We just started up, less than a year ago & I think we have aquired 25+ members.
The Falcons have a ridiculously organized approach to things (at least ridiculous for us)
We meet the first Sunday of every month at 12 at our club house behind our sponsoring shop.
Meetings start promptly at 12 (oh who am I kidding, we’re usually lucky to get started by 12:20)
Meeting kicks off with a style presentation by our Grand Hydrometer (currently, me) and the beer tasting is whatever the GH decides to do. Last month I did the 30th Anniversary Series from Sierra Nevada. Next month I’ll be doing a tasting of “Big and Malty Deutchland Style”
After that tasting (4-5 beers) and back and forth commentary, we usually move onto a technical presentation with me presenting for a few minutes about something that’s interesting to me at the moment.
Then we do business and intersperse business with homebrews. The homebrewers get to stand up, present their beer and talk about them and get feedback.
Then we break for lunch and beer and then come back for even more homebrews.
Meeting usually wraps up sometime around 4:30 or so.
My club has a great host for our meetings. The owner of Mr. Dunderbaks in Tampa is a homebrewer and craft beer lover and closes off the majority of the restaurant for our meetings, which are on the second Tuesday of the month. Meetings have some business and announcements first, then sometimes we have a guest and occasionally somebody will give a presentation or a show and tell, then it’s mostly social. Lots of homebrew is passed around.
On the third Tuesday of the month we hold what I call “judging class.” We meet to sample and judge the style of the month, which is closely associated with the club only competitions of the AHA. We sample commercial examples of the style, have a quick lesson on judging and sensory analysis and then fill out BJCP score sheets on the homebrews, followed by discussion of each one. It’s very educational. We normally have about a dozen people at the “classes” and 30 to 50 at the regular meetings.
In my first club, North Florida Brewers League, there were separate meetings for the technical sessions.
The regular club meetings were held at a restaurant bar that allowed us to meet, eat, and drink and also bring our homebrew for informal evaluation (I wouldn’t really call it judging). These regular meetings were specifically geared to be social with a minor education provided on a monthly beer style and then we had the tasting and evaluation. No heavy technical stuff was typically included in those meetings. These were typically fairly large meetings.
The technical meetings were typically with smaller groups and they were held at a member’s house. These did get into some nifty technical and stylistic evaluations and discussions. The thought was that these technical discussions turned off some people and were sometimes outside the interests of general club members. Having the technical sessions separate let the folks who were really interested in the subject get together and focus on a more closely instead of slipping this into a meeting where some might either be dozing off or disturbing the geeks.
We are only good for about 10-15 minutes of presentation before the natives get restless. We tend to pull in about 25 for each meeting, sometimes more. In the past any educational session has come during the first minutes of the meeting and then we pass the beers. On occasion we’ll have a full blown educational session with a pro brewer or pro meadmaker or will have a longer topic. Now we have been starting the meeting 1/2 hour early for those interested in learning more.
I’ve always gotten more out of the passing of the beers than anything else. As we pass them we might discuss the attributes or flaws in private OR the brewer might ask for real feedback and the group will chime in. Our MO is for the brewer to state the recipe and brewing techniques (mash temp, fementation temp, etc). Often we can figure out why a beer is so good or why it missed the mark from that information. If someone in the crowd has lots of knowledge about an ingredient or practice they will share the info with the group. The beauty is if someone starts stating BS to the group it won’t last long.
Another thing we have is private forums for our members which has tons of information. We’ve got about 100 forum members and have over 12,000 posts from the membership!
Our club is similar to Mike’s in that at about 15 minutes tops people get antsy when discussing technical or style topics during our regular monthly “business” meeting. With other typical business discussion, the total official meeting ends up at an hour or so, which is about the tipping point for attention of your average beer drinker :D. Time afterwards is spent on comraderie and general one-on-one or small group discussions which many times started from the technical discussion during the regular business portion of the meeting.
We hold a separate meeting we call our “stammtisch” each month for a beer swap at someone’s house (unforturnately we cannot bring beer into the brewpub where we meet for business meetings per GA law). We also hold our club-only comps at these and that has led to style discussions on the style to be judged.
Lastly, we hold a separate BJCP class for those who want really detailed information about ingredients, styles, process, etc. For the 6 months before the test, we will meet 1.5 hours prior to the regular meeting plus have additional sessions at a different time during the month.