Our March 21st club meeting was held in the expansive education room at Northern Brewer’s Minneapolis location. Thanks to store manager Kevin and Northern Brewer for hooking us up with the space!
Upcoming Events
- NBA Happy Hour: April 12th – (7:00pm – 9:00pm), 612 Tap Room, 945 Broadway St, Minneapolis — NBA tap room takeover. Let’s dominate! Raffle will occur! Wear your NBA shirts. Don’t have one? Get one.
- Midwest Supplies’ Customer Appreciation Day: April 27th – (9:00am – 3:00pm), Midwest Supplies, 5825 Excelsior Blvd, St Louis Park, MN — Brew at Midwest using their ingredients for free! Participants/batches capped at 5. Let Grant know if you would like to participate.
- Big brew day @ Northgate Brewing: May 4th
Spring Ale Fest: One of the fest’s organizers, Connor, stopped and provided information for the Spring Ale Fest. This will be the second annual event, held in Nordeast Minneapolis, showcasing local breweries with a limited supply of tickets and an intimate setting to enjoy some great craft beer. When: April 6th 2-5pm, VIP starts at 1pm, Where: Uppercut Gym, 1324 Quincy St NE, Minneapolis To get tickets, $40/50, see participating breweries and more info: http://springalefest.com/ The NBA will be there as a vendor so make sure you stop in. This event is in our backyard!St. Paul Summer Beer Fest (Juno Choi, festival creator and tonight’s guest speaker! June 15th – 2-6pm, VIP starts 1pm, MN State Fair Grounds – International Bazaar. 100 craft breweries there, 3rd year at the Fair Grounds, education seminars, music on grassy fields, nearly all MN breweries participating. Tickets go on sale March 22, $40/50, for more info: http://www.stpaulsummerbeerfest.com/
Competitions
Recent Results
In St. Cloud’s March Mashness, Tom Raley took first place out of seventeen entries in the American Ales Table! This was Tom’s second competition. Congratulations, Tom!!
Lagunitas NBA-member only competition!
April 14th (1:00pm) at The Local, 931 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis – Congrats Ryan Patrek who won with his black IPA! Ryan scored the highest of anyone in the first round, then won the best-in-show (BOS) round.
Lagunitas is calling all clubs to send in their best beer brewed with an American Yeast strain. Other than that, the requirements are minimum, no style guidelines, no spices or fruit. If you have a beer that fits this, get it in the competition! The Local is excited to host, learn and get involved. Judging will be April 14th and participants will need to bring a 6 pack. Fill in the Google form to let us know you plan to participate. So far, 5-6 people have signed up. We will decide on judging style once we know how many will compete, ideally we will mimic BJCP style judging (averaging scores, miniBOS, then a final BOS session). The NBA winner will need have another 6 pack to send to Lagunitas, due by May 1st.
2nd NBA Nordeast Big River Homebrew Competition coming in October. Last year was a great success! We had 155 entries. We will continue our focus was on sour and funky beers. This event provided substantial funding to our club. As the event grows, we would eventually, we’d like to make charitable donations. We need to start planning very soon, if you would like to help out, contact Tyler or Nick.
Experiments update:
Our club has 295 gallons of beer in oak barrels right now!!!!
Barrel 1.0: Honey Wine barrel from Town Hall Brewery . The first NBA barrel project is 10 months old. Our Russian River Temptation clone has funktified and is nearly ready to be emptied. Before this happens, we need to determine a new sour beer to fill it with. At a minimum we need 14 volunteers to get in on the next fill. We will be emptying and filling within a 48 hour period. Keep an eye out for postings on the Google groups regarding participation.
Barrel 2.0: We now have 4 Red Wine Barrels (donated by Casey) full or nearly full of amazing beer – an RIS, Wee Heavy, Flander’s Red and Rye Saison to be specific. The barrels are housed in De Boers Cellars. At only a month old, these barrels have some time left to impart delicious oaky flavor, notes of the previous grape-derived occupants, as well as to funktify half the brews.
Yeast Experiment
Timing is TDB. The NBA will be partnering with Northgate Brewing to conduct an amazing yeast experiment. We are lucky to have two founding members of the NBA involved with Northgate.
The plan is for Northgate to brew and chill a batch of wort to our specifications. We will pay for the ingredients
Each member will fill a carboy with wort, and pitch a yeast of their choosing. After fermentation and carbonation is complete, we will taste these beers side by side to see the crazy differences a yeast can make (ala the Single Hop Experiment)
Summer BBQ and a Low Gravity Competition
This takes the place of our June meeting. Last year was awesome and it will continue! All you need to know now is that we will be having our low-gravity club competition (<6% ABV) and you will need a 6-pack of 12 oz bottles to compete.
Single Hop Experiment
For the third year in a row, this landmark event’s tasting will be held during our July meeting. More details will be coming soon. All members will be brewing the same recipe, each choosing a different hop variety to be used at identical IBU additions. Plan to be brewing in May.
EDUCATION | SMaSH* Experiment Tasting – Thanks to Tyler!
The goal of this experiment was to taste the characteristics imparted by three different specialty malts.
Recipe:
91.6% 2-row,8.4% specialty malt
60 min: 32 IBU Mt. Hood (6.1% AA)
30 min: 16 IBU Mt. Hood (6.1% AA)
15 min: 4 IBU Mt. Hood (6.1% AA)
US-05 Safeale
The specialty malts used were Victory Malt, Gambrinus Honey Malt, and Briess Special Roast.
OGs were 1.060-1.063, and everything finished at 1.010-1.013.
Tasting Notes:
Special Roast – “Breadier, roastier” – 5 Gallon batch – Also had a honey sweet flavor. By far the driest. Very roasty – Grant didn’t like this one. Others liked and would drink Special Roast.
Victory – 3 Gallon batches. Many liked and would drink Victory. Some thought a Belgian characteristic came through.
Honey – 3 Gallon batches. Strong, aroma, finished dry. Other comments, dial back the honey a little bit.
Malt 101 – Guest speaker, Juno Choi , Brewers Supply Group
Juno Choi of Brewers Supply Group discussed the malting process in great detail. BSG supplies about 85-90% craft breweries in US. Checkout Juno’s presentation on the malting process!
Casey’s Home Malting Experience
NBA member Casey malted his own grain at home. The process was conceptually similar to what Juno explained, just on a smaller scale. Took 7-10 days. Got barley from Colorado Malting. Steep and rest, 12 hours each. Put on a table about 3×6 feet, an inch deep. Laid on plastic bags to get it germinate. Can weigh it to get the moisture content. Hand turned it. Liked to rub his barley at stage 2 ;). Dried it with box fan on floor. Loaded up on 2-3 glass Pyrex pans in oven at 170-175 degrees in for 5-6 hours, like a pilsner color. 2-row, pale – added 10% longer and hotter and got more a brown malt. 6-row also smoked the lager. Made about 5 gallons for the 12 pounds he started with (ended up around 10 pounds). Gravity was 1050 for 2-row and 1028 for 6-row. First try – super easy but took a lot of time. Very rewarding and EVERYONE should try it!
Yeast Bank
One of our new members, Chris, came from an Oklahoma brew club which had a yeast bank. He is interested (and willing) to host a club yeast bank. Details need to be ironed out, but there would be a set day (once every week or so) for members to pick up a jar of yeast.. We will need a vote to affirm club funding for jars, supplies. Chris likes yeast culturing and washing part very exciting. Anything that is commercially done, he can do but not much on wild. Watch NBA email for more details.
Prizes
Raffle compliments of Brewers Supply Group. Sack 2-Row – Luke Henselh wins!! Sack of Pilsner – Brad Squibb wins!!
Raffle compliments of Spring Ale Fest. Two sets of tickets to attend event go to Nick Pederson and Tim Stuemke!!
Thank You Members, Guests and Sponsors!!
