! Heart of the Valley Homebrewers

This is the HOTV Brewsletter
VOLUME XXV, NUMBER 2
February 2005

PRESIDENT: Scott Caul
VICE-PRESIDENT: Matt Arsenault
NEWSLETTER EDITOR: Mare Goeger
TREASURER: Scott Leonard
FESTIVAL DIRECTOR: Joel Rea

THIS MONTH'S MEETING

The Heart of the Valley Homebrew Club meets on the third Wednesday of each month, alternating between Corvallis and Albany. Our next meeting will be Wednesday, February 16, at 7:00 p.m., hosted by Joel Rea and Derek Whiteside at Corvallis Brewing Supply / Whitesides Beer and Wine in Corvallis.

Whiteside's / Corvallis Brewing Supply is located at 119 SW 4th Street in downtown Corvallis. Please check your beer and wine openers at the door.

Business to be discussed: Progress on May's festival; update from Michael and Ron on coastal pub crawling (see below). Sign-up for any festival positions not yet spoken for.

LAST MONTH'S MEETING

Thanks go out to Paul Jensen for hosting the January meeting. A decision was made to go for the big one. For the 3rd year in a row, HOTV will host a microbrew festival in conjunction with its annual homebrew competition. This event, to be held Saturday, May 21 at the Benton County Fairgrounds will be coordinated by none other than Joel Rea. On the pub crawl front, Michael Villiardos and Ron Hall have volunteered to organize the next pub crawl.

PUB CRAWL PROPOSAL
by Michael Villiardos

What I want to do is a coast crawl. Go to Siletz, then on to Rogue. Then to Lincoln city Mcmenamins (Lighthouse Brew Pub). From there maybe up to Pacific City (Pelican), or over to McMinnville (Golden Valley). Or from the coast, we could go straight into Salem to The Ram and/or Cascade microbrewery. And then home. That's the rough draft.

BJCP STUDY GROUP

Bill Baxter is organizing a study group for anyone interested in taking the BJCP test. Please contact him (bad930s@hotmail.com) if you would like to join in.

PRESIDENT'S CORNER
By Scott Caul

Nothing. He's golfing in Arizona. And taking lessons to boot. Keep that in mind when you sign up to play at the pre-picnic game in August.

ZYMURGY HOP EXPERIMENT
by Dave Benson

Just an update on the Hop experiment for the club:
The day started off nice and early around 8:00 AM. Bill Baxter, Scott Caul and myself fired up the RIMS and started the brew. We learned a lot those first few hours and the best lesson is definitely DON'T overload the RIMS with grain. We pushed her to 30lbs (limit of 24) and about the time the mash got to 130, we smelled a distinct burnt aroma. Upon tasting the mash, we all gagged and dumped it out to feed to the pigs. We gave up on the RIMS and used Scott's mash tun and the rest of the bag of grain with some top up from Scott's private stash. After the mash got going, we decided it was beer:30. Scott had a Baltic porter on nitro, a strong amber, and a pale ale on tap that helped take the edge off the scorched brew. Joel stopped by shortly after we burned the mash and we had pizza. He took away the offending RIMS and offered to clean the element for the group. Thanks Joel. Mash out was good, except we added too much water to the mash and bringing it up to mash out temp took a while. We ran all the run-off into a single barrel and thoroughly mixed it up to make sure each batch started very similar. This was then split into 3 different boil kettles, with two different geometries. Since one of them didn't have markings for volume we made some guesses on five gallons worth. We also slightly screwed up the additions thanks to me and added 0.5 oz hops at 45, 30, 15, and 0 instead of 60, 30, 15, and 0. We chose to end the boil early to try to preserve the hop aroma for the test. After chilling down we realized our volumes and gravities were off:

Centennial: ~5.5 gallons of unknown gravity
Crystal: ~4.5 gallons of 1.055
Cascade: ~3.5 gallons of 1.060

Yeast used was a three vial starter from Whitelab's: German Ale/Kolsch

So there will be variations within the experiment, but the overall effect I think will be preserved. The hope is to have the beer bottled and over time sample at the meetings, as well as Joel using some for his shop training (he subsidized the experiment). Since the bottled beer probably won't be ready for the next meeting we can siphon off an amount and force carbonate to give people a chance to sample this month along with samples of the hops for comparison.


© 1995-2008 HOTV

EVENTS CALENDAR

Apr 4-15, '05 Entries accepted for National Homebrew Competition, $8/entry for members, $12/entry for non-members
May 7, '05 Big Brew - National Homebrew Day
May 21, '05 Oregon Homebrew Festival and Microbrew Festival, hosted by HOTV at the Benton County Fairgrounds, Corvallis
July '05 National Beer Month
Aug 21, '05 HOTV Annual Picnic, Avery Park, Corvallis

AHA CLUB-ONLY COMPETITIONS

Here is the latest list for AHA Club-only competitions. Dave Benson will be coordinating mailings of HOTV's top beer to these categories. Bring your entries to the club meeting indicated, and our top-notch judges will choose the best entry for sending in. We've done pretty well in the past, let's try and out-do Strange Brew in number of points scored.

Mar/April '05 Sour beers (category 17) Bring to February meeting
May '05 Extract (extract must make up greater than 50% of fermentables) No details yet
Aug '05 Belgian & French Ale No details yet
Sep/Oct '05 European Amber Lager No details yet
Nov/Dec "05 Baltic Porter


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