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Hey BAMers!  It’s that wonderful time of year when we homebrewers get together and spread holiday cheer by sharing tasty libations with each other.  This year the Christmas party will be at Faction Brewing on Saturday December 13th at 2pm.  The address for those that need it is: 2501 Monarch St, Alameda, CA 94501

Please take note that this will take the place of the normal Thursday meeting for December.

Never homebrewed before?

Here’s your chance to see it in action and help out on a brew. Saturday November 1st is 2014 Learn To Homebrew Day. Here’s how it works :

Current Bay Area Mashers will be organizing brewdays at their houses and around town. The locations and times will be posted here (below) along with their contact info. Email them saying you’d like to attend and they’ll reply with directions and details. Meetup on Saturday, learn how homebrewing works and help out with the brew!

Learn To Homebrew Day Locations

Contact any of the hosts to join in the fun!

• Berkeley near Gilman & San Pablo starting at noon2pm on Saturday : Contact the host, Matt, to join
• West Oakland starting at 1pm on Sunday (not Saturday) : Contact the host, Doug, to join

Are you a BAM homebrewer?

If you’d like to organize a brew day on Learn To Homebrew Day here’s what to do :

1. Email the officers saying that you’re going to host a brew day on Saturday. Provide the street address that you’ll be brewing at.
2. Register your Learn To Homebrew Day (use this page as the “website” field http://www.bayareamashers.org/blog/2014/10/27/learn-to-homebrew-day-2014/ )
3. Find 3 (or more) people who haven’t brewed before to join you. These can be people you already know or people who contact you from the club or both.
4. Keep your receipts for your materials.
5. Take some photos and either share them in the Facebook group, in the Flickr group, or send them to the officers.

In return, the club will reimburse you for your materials costs (up to $50).

Next month we’ll be hosting the meeting back at Faction Brewing in Alameda.

The head brewer, Rodger Davis, will give us a tour of the facility and talk about the process of starting up his brewery. Bring your brewery related questions, a cup, and of course some homebrew to share. Should be a great meeting!

Also, if you’re participating in Matt’s yeast offer, remember to bring your cash and cooler (see his email for more details).

Hey fellow BAMers. Matt Youngblut and Lee Shepard are going to be giving a super interesting talk and demonstration covering the common off-flavors one might encounter when homebrewing.

They are planning on purchasing Coors Light (or similar) to be a (bland) base beer as a reference, and from that they’ll be spiking in off-flavors to give the people attending experience with what some common off-flavors taste like, their sources, and how to prevent them.

The eight off-flavors that we’re going to be focusing on are:

• Acetic
• Acidic
• Alcoholic
• Astringent
• Clovelike
• Diacetyl
• Estery
• Sweetness

This is also a great intro for those looking to take their tasting chops to the next level, and perhaps see themselves as BJCP judges one day. So, be sure to attend this month’s meeting. Not a member yet? No problem. Come check us out, and if you like what we do, think about becoming a member.

Rylan Ortiz, one of our BAM Technical Coordinator’s, has been working with the BAM officers, in collaboration with Speakeasy Ales & Lagers (San Francisco), is considering brewing wort on the Speakeasy 15 barrel (500 gallon) brewhouse for the club to take and then ferment at home. The other intent is after fermentation and packaging of your share of beer, maybe a month later, come back to SE with it for a party.

Speakeasy also wants to award the Best of Show brewer with a gift certificate to their taproom.

The date will be end of October or early November, depending on the breweries expansion project deadlines. The brew day would most likely be a Saturday, however, it could be a Sunday too.

If you’re interested, send an email with the subject “Wort Off!!!!” to  rylan.ortiz@gmail.com with your conformation and contact information.

Below are some pictures of the 15BB system for all you equipment geeks.

Call for beer, judges, and stewards

Coming up on Saturday, October 4 is Oaktoberfest in the Dimond!  This local beer festival also includes a homebrew alley which is always one of the most popular areas of the festival.  B.A.M. will be setting up our tap board, and are looking for donations of kegs of beer to pour.  Donation of a keg & some time behind the taps gets you entry to the festival and a tasting glass (a $50 value).  Please reach out to me to coordinate pickup! Yes, we take both ball and pin lock.

In addition, The Mad Zymurgists are looking for help in judging the Oaktoberfest homebrew competition.  With this year’s exciting grand prize of having the winning beer brewed by 21st Amendment Brewery, we know they will need more judges & stewards than ever!

For information on entering the competition and all other information, please visit the madzymurgists.com Web site.

FINAL JUDGING WILL BE HELD ON SEPTEMBER 27th AT THE HOPYARD ALEHOUSE IN PLEASANTON FROM 9:30am to 12:00pm

If you have experience as a judge, whether a BJCP judge or a novice judge, we can use your help for what will surely be a record for our annual competition.

If you have experience as a steward, we can use your help as well.  And if you would like to learn more about competitions and judging, pitching in as a new steward is a great way to learn more about how competitions and judging works.  It’s fun, informative, and easy!

If you can help out as a judge or steward, please contact the Judge Coordinator, Jon Koerber at oaktoberfest@madzymurgists.com or jon@koerber.com.

Please provide:

1) Your Full Name
2) Your mobile telephone number
3) If you wish to help as a JUDGE or as a STEWARD (please include your BJCP number if judging)
4) Categories entered in the competition that you cannot judge
5) Categories in the competition you prefer to judge

For more information on Oaktoberfest, please see: http://www.oaktoberfest.org

As cider season is fast approaching, the club thought that we’d diverge from beer for a second to talk about the styles and process behind this historic beverage.

Matt Youngblut, hot off a successful club mead making party on National Mead Day, gave a thorough presentation on everything cider. He covered the history, styles, process, and some fun personal stories from his cider making experiences. Who knew there were so many different kinds of apples!?!

If you weren’t able to make it, or just want a copy for posterity, you can download a copy of it here.

Linden Street Brewery needed to unexpectedly use the room we normally meet in and so that room is temporarily unavailable. Since it didn’t look like they would reliably have it available for the August meeting we’ve temporarily moved the meeting to the gracious hosts, Ale Industries. We’re planning to begin meeting again at Linden Street come September if the room is free by then.

The meeting will have a special presentation on cider making, as cider season is coming up soon.

Separate from the temporary venue change for August, the officers have been chatting about the notion of seeing if there would be a better place to meet. This is in an early exploratory phase of conversation and the membership will be carefully consulted if we see an opportunity for a different venue. Linden Street continues to be fully supportive of BAM and happy to host us, we’ve just been considering if there was a location with better facilities to make club meetings more enjoyable

A big thanks to Adam Wyss from DOZE for coming down this month to give us an awesome presentation on Brew in a Bag brewing. For those of you that missed this months presentation, you can check out the slides here.

Many thanks to Justin for the slide deck and Janine and Ian for presenting last night. Here are the slides if you missed it or would like to read more details.