Sorry I couldn’t give you that clear an answer, Dean. I guess I just didn’t understand what you were getting at as well as Drew did. He’s pretty bright for a kid! 
A lot of what we do is spelled out on the AHA website in the Government Affairs section: Statutes - American Homebrewers Association.
In terms of homebrew legalization, the process works like this:
We are contacted by local homebrewers who are interested in changing the laws in their state.
We can provide history of past attempts to legalize homebrewing based on whatever records we have on file.
We can help line-up allies within the brewing community.
We also advise homebrewers through the legislative process, provide samples of statute language from other states, who to involve in the process, how to avoid creating enemies that can sink the process, etc.
When needed, we rally the troops to contact politicians to garner support for bills, including all AHA members within the state, Brewers Association brewery members, and Support Your Local Brewery Members as well as posts to the AHA Forum and TechTalk. We include other influential people within the brewing community, such as The Brewing Network, Basic Brewing Radio, and Beer Advocate in our Action Alerts. We also use social media, including twitter (@AHADirector) and the AHA Facebook page to spread the word.
For both Oklahoma and Utah, we sent press releases when the legalization bills were signed into law, though our media database is primarily beer and food writers.
Gary Glass
AHA Director
As an incoming member of the board, I’m happy to see a dialogue occurring between members and the board. This forum is a great tool for such discourse, and I’m happy that it is being utilized.
I’ve read everything posted here so far, and thought I’d just put my two-cents in. With this being said, I would welcome requests and discussions on what members would like to see, and find out how my ideas intersect with my fellow AHA members. The following is a short list of what I’d like to accomplish:
- Make efforts to increase dialogue between the AHA and it’s members (like this thread!)
- Explore more grass roots efforts (like AHA wort rallies) in raising the awareness and engagement within the hobby of homebrewing.
- Develop approaches though new media. (shameless plug, but it’s applicable - www.brewingtv.com)
- Work to get homebrewing into a main-stream discourse vs. niche hobby. This is essentially the balance to point #2 in a coordinated effort to move homebrewing into main stream culture.
- Develop stronger relationships with partners and entities in the homebrewing industry, as they have historically done some heavy lifting for homebrewing culture, and will be crucial in it’s future.
These of course are bullet points. And much like a typical politician they are easy come, easy go from the mouth. I do have specific road-maps and plans on how to attain them though. My goal is to lay these ideas out as I work with other board members and develop my role in assisting the AHA.
I think the AHA’s future as an organization, and how it serves it’s members, faces daunting demands but explosive potential. I will go forward with this belief as long as I’m asked to serve.
cheers!
It’s great to have you and Fred as new blood on the GC, Jake. Believe it or not, I kinda look forward to that 6 hour meeting every NHC because of what gets done in charting the course of the AHA. The more feedback we solicit from members, the better we serve them and the hobby.
Since we have the new revised friendly and super spiffy home page.
Where the heck are the PDF and sessions from previous years located?
I can’t seem to find them.
http://ahaconference.org/speakerspresentation.html
But I’m with you…they should be easier to find. I’ll see what we can do about that.
At this years conference there seems to be a focused effort to gather the presentations from the speakers. Not all presentations from past years are on the site. If this years are all posted in a few weeks, I will view this as good progress.
At the conference you can’t make it to all of the sessions, so having the ability to read the presentations is one way around that.
PS - Good to see you last night, Denny.
You, too, Jeff!
I would like to see the AHA make the competition software used for the National Competition available as shareware to the clubs.
Wow, no kidding! I’ve been using HCCP, and as much as I really appreciate all the effort that Al put into it, I’d love something a bit friendlier to use.
One of this year’s “themes” for the AHA Governing Committee annual meeting agenda was how to identify and solicit some of its memberships passion and skill sets to help the organization be stronger, more member orientated and to help spread some of the good ideas we have heard from members.
We discussed and agreed that we will try very specific and targeted “asks” of the membership. Two areas that were initially discussed were club insurance and some sort of national homebrew experiement.
I am happy to say that during the AHA member meeting on Friday that one individual from the Beer Barons of Milwalkee (name withheld until something materializes) indicated that their club currently does have liability insurance, is set up as a not for profit, and he has volunteered to share their policy with me. I have 20 years of Insurance experience, so I will be able to disect the policy and perhaps something nationally could become available. Or it may end up being a state specific policy only - we will see.
Another member approached fellow AHA GC member Fred Bonjour and indicated that he had a legal background, and could potentially provide some state reviews of their shipping laws. Here at Ford, a 50 state review is a very expensive and time consuming task. It would be wonderful if we could get more members to share their skill sets and provide the,m with some recognition and appreciation for their efforts.
The biggest concern is having people raise their hands to help out and then not following through. This is why we will focus on specific and targeted “asks” of our membership. Are you a biologist, a chemist, social media guru or have some other talent that you want to help out on? Watch for these asks on the Forum as Gary, his staff (Janis & Kate), the GC and the AHA members respond.
In the end, I have to say after six years on the AHA Governing Committee, the AHA does a bang up job with their limited resources. Could they do more? I believe that they could, but only by reducing their focus on what they are currently doing an excellent job on.
Since I have become chairperson of this august group, I have urged the AHA GC to do more. As you look at who is on the GC, they all do a terrific job of promoting the hobby in their own ways. So perhaps the biggest bang we can get for our hobby is to seek out, identify, encourage and help our members become more involved. Even if we gain only 1/10th of 1% of our members to chip in, that would be an additional 20 subject matter experts. And like Justin, one of our newest GC members has done, we can ally our members to be another “Army” of passionate, involved volunteers. These are indeed exciting times for the GC, the AHA and the hobby.
EXACTLY!!!
The AHA is a member organization. It is my estimation that in recent years the members of this hobby have grown up with the internet and there are a lot of “youngbloods” getting into homebrewing. So, to me the governing committee should ensure the AHA is a resource for brewers in all “modern” mediums (i.e. youtube, this website and forum, facebook, etc.)
Additionally, there are old school ideas about what homebrew clubs are and are not in the AHA. The internet has changed this. More specifically, there are not geographical limitations to group membership and sharing information. Internet homebrew clubs should be addressed by the governing committee. I think groups, like the brewingnetwork should be able to win homebrew club of the year.
In what way do you think this is not being done? Not hassling you, just curious…as far as I can tell, internet clubs are acknowledged already. But I’ll look into your comments to make sure reality reflects my perceptions.
And I’m not sure where they ended up, but the BN was actually in the lead going into Round 2. We did introduce a while back a rule that restricted geographically dispersed clubs from winning more points from a category than they could from a single region to balance things out a little
Denny, you are correct. For some reason I had it in my mind that internet clubs were not recognized. I was mistaken and I see that the brewing network is a recognized club.
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while! 
The Committees that we are on will give you an idea of what we are working on (below)
AHA Governing Committee Subcommittees
http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/pages/membership/aha-governing-committee
Club Support
Justin Crossley & Curt Stock (Co-Chairs), Roxanne Westendorf and Drew Beechum
Competitions
Harold Gulbransen (Chair), Paul Schick, Gordon Strong, Jamil Zainasheff and Curt Stock
Conference
Bob Kauffman (Chair), Fred Bonjour, Harold Gulbransen, Jamil Zainasheff, Curt Stock, Roxanne & Rob Westendorf and Jim Homer
Evange-ALE-ist/Pub Discount Program
Fred Bonjour (Chair), Chris Graham, Jeff Renner and Chris Frey
Retail
Jake Keller (Chair), Chris Graham, Justin Crossley and Dave Logsdon
Surveys
Roxanne Westendorf (Chair), Chris Frey, Chris Graham and Jake Keeler
Web
Denny Conn (Chair), Fred Bonjour, Drew Beechum, Dave Logsdon and Justin Crossley
Zymurgy Content
Drew Beechum (Chair), Roxanne Westendorf, Dave Logsdon, Jeff Renner, Denny Conn and Chris Frey
[quote]I would like to see the AHA make the competition software used for the National Competition available as shareware to the clubs.
[/quote]
I would like to second this sentiment. Here are some ideas for requirements.
- Accept online entry data and output to a standard format.
- Output category winners list in PDF, Excel, or some other standard electronic format.
- Output points by brewer and club for use by regional competition circuit to keep totals for total brewer points, club points and team points.
- Interface with PayPal or other payment options to gather data.
- Be able to select categories for a competition that does not include all BJCP styles and/or groups styles in different categories. We have at least four such competitions in the Lone Star Circuit(Bluebonnet, Celtic, Limbo and Dixie Cup).
I would not expect all features to be in a beginning list. Actually I rather liked the online entry used this year by the Cactus Challenge. There has to be some software out there that would be acceptable as a starting point but just needs some mods. It would require someone to register it with something like SourceForge.net.
Would it be possible for the AHA provide seed money for such an effort by someone/group who could do the programming. Maybe have a submission of software for review by a panel that would select a winner. The winner would receive some sort of reimbursement for their effort. The reimbursement could be cash, NHC event registration paid for the next year, or free AHA membership for 1-n years.
Great idea, but really this is nothing the GC can make a unilateral decision on. This has to come from the AHA.
We looked into making the NHC database into something that could be made available to a broader array of competitions a while back. The NHC is a rather specialized competition, so while it works well for the NHC, it wouldn’t work well for most other competitions. Beyond that, we realized that we really didn’t have the means of offering tech support for a competition database. It’s a lot to ask of a volunteer to create a database that could be widely used in many different competition scenarios and provide tech support into the future. If someone is interested in doing that, great!