We have a similar issue with the Barons (around 200 members). We meet on a the 4th Wednesday of every month and have an attendance of 100 to 120. Some want more homebrewing technical homebrewing presentations, others want more general discussions. In order to keep the homebrewers happy and bring in more new brewers we started our Brew U educational program about three years ago. Because of the program we’re seeing more and more homebrewers show up to the monthly meetings and greater requests for more homebrew focused discussion. This year we’ll be adjusting our classes a bit more to offer more advanced topics since we’re planning on covering more beginning and intermediate topics during the monthly meetings.
One thing we’ve learned and you may already know - brew is served at the monthly meetings which means you’ll only have an audience’s attention for maybe 60 to 90 minutes. After that it gets too hard to keep people’s attention and the side conversations to a low roar. Because of this we’ll probably always have some advanced classes away from the monthly meetings because they are either too technical (like advanced yeast or hops sessions) or does not appeal to a large audience (bjcp study sessions).
Here is a link to the classes we offered last year if you’re looking for ideas - http://beerbarons.org/Brew-U/classCatalog.html. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the classes or if you’d like to see some of our presentation material.
That’s an impressive syllabus! Would you be willing to post this information and a link to your website to the AHA Club Wiki? http://ahaclubs.homebrewersassociation.org/ You’ll need to be registered on that wiki to post, but you can sign up with the same information as you use for the AHA Forum. I think this information would be great under the Running A Club ==> General Management section. You can copy this Forum post and then paste as text into the page you create. Let me know if you have any questions or problems.
Yes I think having some technical content at regular meetings and special technical meetings should be a good compromise. But I doubt that we’ll get as organized as guys you are ;).
Well, organized might be a strong word for how we get things done. I will say that our planning got a little more serious in our second year of classes. That’s when we got an email from a woman in the Chicago area wanting to send her husband and a friend to Milwaukee for the weekend to attend our Intermediate Class. She was giving the trip to her husband as a Christmas present. No pressure… :o
I’m a member of the Southern Maine Homebrewers. Some of our members have expressed an interest in discussing the more technical aspects of brewing at club meetings, so recently we’ve been trying to incorporate a short information session with each meeting. Somewhere in the 20-30 minute range, the topic can be about styles, techniques, etc. November’s meeting consisted of going over the style notes for Belgian Tripels, and sampling a couple commercial examples since there were no homebrewed versions available.