Starting a Brewclub

In January Adrienne and I moved from San Jose, CA to Bryan, TX. The Bay Area has a thriving homebrew culture and I was a member of the Silicon Valley Sudzers. Club meetings and outings are something that Adie and I both enjoyed and we left a great group of people behind. Sadly, the Bryan/College Station metro offers no clubs.

Last month I started looking for interest in starting up a club. In my research I came across a Yahoo! group from a club that had been active in the early part of the century (last post 2005). I believe that there are enough brewers in the area to support a club so, with the help of Adrienne and two or three other brewers, I am founding a B/CS club.

We do not have a name yet, but we do have a first event: a brew-in on April 5th. The first order of business is to publish the event in the various electronic media, and track interested people.

Watch this blog for my experiences starting a club. I have some solid resources back with the Sudzers, the Draft Board, and the Mad Zymurgists.

WTFAMH Kölsch

The temperature dropped into the low 30's F for a few nights last week. On one of the last such nights I put the kölsch out overnight to crash cool in preparation for transfer to a keg. That crash, three weeks of sitting and a little Irish moss have done their job. I was rewarded with a clear yellow beer.
The kölsch turned out great. Pours clear and golden with a lingering thin white head. It has a medium-light body balanced to the malty side with enough bitterness to be barely noticeable. Since it was in the fermenter for so long the FG dropped to 1.009 and it tastes just a little over-attenuated. My only gripe with it is that I only got 3.5 gallons of it.