April 2011, Meeting Notes

Greetings DUFF Members

The Quarterly meeting was held at Joe and Teresa's place over in the Hillsboro area on April 1st, what a wonderful time we had!

We held our first DUFF Club beer competition judging in quite a few years as we sampled and judged the beer entries for the winter/spring quarter beer, Maibock. Joe's beer was rated third, Randy's second, and Jim's was first place. This was an informal, fun, event with small prizes awarded as we critiqued each other's homebrew samples. We'll be doing that again each quarter, so if you missed out on this contest, you can get in on the fun at the next quarterly meeting in July.

The beer style for this next quarter 'May, June, and July' is Cream Ale. The Cream Ale Judging will be held at the July 1st meeting at Fritz's place in Mauston and DUFF Club Cream ale kits will be available starting May 7th, at the Big Brew. One of the events we will be doing during the Big brew is measuring out the ingredients for the Cream Ale kits. The price of the Extract cream Ale kit will be $17.50. The DUFF club will be making about $3.00 per kit and the members will be saving nearly $10 per kit over the mail-order & shipping price. It's a good deal for everyone. All-grain kits will also be available but I haven't calculated the price of those yet. If you want to order a kit, let me know how many you would like. I bought enough specialty grains and extract so that we could make about 30 kits.

The Beer style for the August, September, October Fall quarter will be October Fest and we plan to offer the same type of DUFF club kits for that as well. Please submit recipe suggestions so that supplies can be purchased and available for the October Kits in July.

The Big Brew is scheduled for May 7th at Sandy and Mel's farm near Lime Ridge. This is the third annual Big Brew we've held and the beer style we've selected this year for our club is Porter. There may be more than one Brew going that day so come out and join the fun and stay the night if you need to. The official start time is 10:00am but people come earlier and stay till all the beer is done. Let me know how much porter you would like so we can plan the Mash and the ingredients to purchase. I'll be sending out information as the day approaches or call me 608-415-0091 for information.

June - is the Brew at the Barn in Baraboo. If you plan on entering beer or wine, please let Christine know so she can make an introductory booklet for the event. There is a very convenient on-line form that you can complete here.

July - is the Quarterly meeting in Mauston at Fritz and Nancy's place. Judging of the Cream Ale enteries.

August - Meeting will be held near Reedsburg at Jim and Kathy's place.

September - Joe's place near Hillsboro

October - Randy's place in Camp Douglas.

I hope I've covered the highlights of the April meeting (missed the Hog's head episode but we'll all have to ask Kathy about that! Ha! Ha!). It's been a busy week and I'm off to Tomah this morning for the Barley and Hops Seminar.

Have a great day.

Mel