Canberra Brewers

Member Profile: Chris De La Rue

Compiled by Patrick Baggoley

People get into serious home brewing for many different reasons. They might enjoy the creative side of learning new recipes, the engineering side of solving process issues or building equipment, the material side of collecting gadgets and toys, the sharing good beer with mates, or just the challenge of creating a quality product from first principals.

Chris De La Rue, aka Growler, is one person who ticks all those boxes, and more. To say he is passionate about beer and brewing is an understatement. Some may say he's obsessive, and who are we to say that’s a bad thing!

Meticulous is the best word to describe both Chris’ brewing and his home brewery. On a brew day, everything is polished (literally) and planned to the nth degree, an impressive sight. The equipment is carefully thought-out, and you know he’s spent just as much time planning the recipe as he has working out the process.

Member Profile: John Worthy

Compiled by Sam Highley

For this second member profile, we thought we'd introduce you to a member that many people in the club will not have met, despite being a member since 2007. John lives all the way out in rural Royalla, about twenty minutes past Tuggeranong on the way to Cooma, so he doesn't get to too many club meetings. I guess the lack of carpool opportunities, along with the non-existent bus and taxi service out that way, makes meeting-attendance somewhat challenging.

In between being attacked by trees while mowing paddocks around his property, John leads the ideal semi-retired rural life: brewing beer in his garage, and then consuming it!

Member Profile: Mark Bilbrough

Compiled by Patrick Baggoley

Like many good brewers, Mark Bilbrough (better known as Billy) started out playing with kits in order to get cheap beer. But the Canberra Brewers helped turn this into a full-blown addiction to American hops and an unsettling devotion to Jamil Zainasheff and the Brewing Network.

Billy’s engineering background makes each brew session an exercise in striving for precision, chasing numbers and playing with gadgets while trying to eliminate unnecessary steps from the process. And this has resulted in some outstanding results.

This year while juggling work travel, family duties and brewing as much as possible (all while listening to BN podcasts), he’s also taken on the role of Competition Secretary, having successfully run our first club comp for 2011 — a huge effort considering we had a whopping 50 beers.

And, like most good engineers, he enjoys the challenge of finding the bottom of a beer glass, whenever possible. Repeatedly. ;-)

The brewers behind the beer

By Patrick Baggoley

This week we’re starting what we hope will be a fortnightly series of club member profiles. The plan is that these will help us get to know each other better, and share some useful information about the different ways we aim to go about achieving essentially the same thing: brewing great beer. The philosophy is that there are few “wrong” ways to do things, and an almost infinite number of “right” ways. The brewer with the simplest process can often teach the brewer with the most complicated equipment a thing or two, and vice versa.

We’ve drawn up a list of basic questions, which may evolve over time or change depending on the person being questioned. And, as usual, a picture tells a thousand words so hopefully we’ll be able to put together a good image bank to help illustrate how different members go about their hobby. Anyway, to kick things off, our first profile will be of our venerable Competition Secretary, Mark Bilbrough (aka Billy), and will be published in the next few days.