We’re starting a new technically-focused meeting in two weeks and I’m wondering if any of you have ideas about what form these meetings should take, what should be discussed, etc. Our rough draft is currently: 30 min presentation, 5 min Q&A, 15-30 min BJCP style example discussion, 30 min ‘what happened to my beer?’ panel and then 30 min → ??? general discussion.
Sounds pretty good, maybe a bit long? my club does a technical session most months. We do a30-40 minute period with a presentation on a bjcp style with examples to taste then we go back to general meeting format. Folks are getting pretty antsy after 40 minutes or so. Course we are americans so that might make a…
Sorry, got distracted. What was I saying?
Are you having a meeting just for technical topics or are you adding technical topics to a regular homebrew meeting?
Purely technical. We already have two social meetings per month, and as those are in the evening and as this is France, they don’t get started until 9pm. I was used to these sort of things getting going at 6pm and ending around 9 (what they do in London for example), and for most of the social meetings I ended up sitting in the bar by myself waiting around for 2 hours before people started to show up. Thus I figured I’d just start something else that I could do on my own schedule. Fourth Sunday of the month at 1pm is totally doable for me, so I picked that time and now we’ve got 5 or 6 people scheduled to come by. From what I’ve seen the majority of the club is not really interested in hearing about how they can improve their beer (even if they could probably use it) so everybody wins.