Canberra Brewers

Judging and Presidential Brew Day

By Darryl Barbour, President

G’day brewers, last month was a busy one for the committee, with sponsorship arrangements and moving forward on a few of the purchases we talked about at the last meeting. In particular, I’ve been hunting down the oxygen equipment for the proposed club buy. I’ve now sourced a good price on the needle valve and flow-meter assembly, and appropriate airstones so we should be ready to kick this off. Check the forum for more details in the next few days.

Of course, brewing leads to beer which leads to club competitions. The judging on Sunday 28 March was great – not so much in that we, the judges, were great (though feel free to tell is that), but rather the quality of the beers was on the whole superb. It was especially great to see a few new names amongst the brewers at the top of each category. I’ve said it before, but we’ve got a National’s title to defend and looking at the number of brewers producing great beers, we’ve got to have a good shot at it. No resting though, it’s time to get those strong lagers and strong ales in the fermenter, to get them ready on time.

As Big Kev would say: i'm excited

By Paul Haesler, Treasurer

Hey all, it's your friendly neighbourhood treasurer Mozzie here. Well - all friendly now we've done the big account switch off at any rate. If you can no longer log on to the forum, it means you haven't paid. You should be aware of this anyway, because it's the most important $30 you'll spend all year (and our web-minion will have sent you an email when he deactivated your account).

At cutoff we had 82 paid-up members, with another 2 paying immediately on receiving their cutoff emails. This is a very healthy membership for this time of year, and I expect that this year we will easily break the highly symbolic 100-member barrier for the first time (We just missed it last year.)

A White Christmas in Scotland

By Stuart Whytcross

Scotland has a rich beer history with evidence of brewing dating back to 3000 years ago. The Celtic tradition of using bittering herbs remained in Scotland longer than the rest of Europe, and although they soon followed the rest of the brewing world, a recent revival of bittering with herbs is re-emerging amongst many brewers in Scotland.

Traditionally in Scotland, brewing was done by the "broustaris", or alewives, and monasteries. Records show that in 1509 Aberdeen had over 150 brewers – all women!

By the mid 19th century Edinburgh had forty breweries and was "acknowledged as one of the foremost brewing centres in the world", the success of Scotland’s brewing industry was partly due to the fact that Tax on beer was held at a lower amount than the rest of the United Kingdom, there was no tax on malt in Scotland…and I’m guessing their beers must have tasted alright as well!

Club competition one

by Sam Highley, Editor

The judging for club competition one kicked off at the crack of 11am last Sunday morning, with beers in the Mild, Northern English Brown, American Brown, Irish Red, Ordinary Bitter, Scottish 60', California Common, Extra Special Bitter (ESB), English and American IPA, Weizen, Dunkelweizen, Blonde Ale and Belgian Wit styles up for judging. Owing to the large number (15) of entries in the American Pale Ale category, they were judged a few nights earlier, along with the two American Brown's entered.

As usual, the entries were judged against the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) guidelines, with each beer being scored on aroma, appearance, flavour, mouthfeel and overall impression, up to a maximum of 50 points. In this case, each beer was judged by three judges, with the individual scores added together to give a final score out of 150. But i've waffled on enough, and everyone is here for one thing, so here are the results:

Building of the Spruce Moose brew stand

By Patrick Baggoley

Having not brewed for about five years, when I finally got the last couple of pieces of gear together to try my first all grain batch in January 2009, I decided to get back into it with a vengeance. 

As most do, I spent my few couple of batches propping up various vessels on milk crates, benches and saw horses, and each time I’d end up trying a different configuration. I’d trip over things, misplace mash paddles and thermometers and generally get very confused. This meant it was hard to get parts of the process such as mash-in, recirculating and sparging properly co-ordinated and consistent.