July Meeting – Raffles Galore!

By Nick Wiseman, Editor

A new venue (in a way), more than forty raffles prizes and 14 kegs of beer made this month’s meeting possibly one of the biggest for the year.

Breweries such as Wig & Pen, Coopers, Mountain Goat and Murrays contributed some great tasting beer and merchandise along with Paul Mercurio’s Cooking with Beer, 40+ bags of hops and a 30-plate chiller to make this month’s raffles one of the biggest ever.

Our new venue (ok, room) for the night was the dance hall as the club has got to the point where it has grown too big for the old meeting room.

The new room provided much more space for people to mingle around although the main concentration did stay pretty close to the clubs miracle boxes (now there’s a change!) seeing as there was a massive 14 kegs of beer for the night – not to mention the normal members own bottles floating about.

The 14 kegs of beer were the beers brewed as part of the International Homebrew Day held on May 4, where each brewer had the same base recipe but used a tweak of some sort to make each beer unique.

The beers went down a treat with the first round containing the base beers being taken out by Rob Horsefield.

The second round of beers included the ‘traditional’ tweaks which was also taken out by Rob with a Berry Belgian and the club President Mark ‘Billy’ Bilbrough took out the third round which was ‘Crazy’ tweaks with his American Belgian.

The media crew who filmed the video from the International Homebrew Day made an appearance on the night to mix in with the crowd as did former Canberra Brewer turned pro Scott ‘Cougar’ Hargrave.

The night went well although Chris “Duffbowl” Duffy almost lost his voice with the abundance of raffle prizes to call and everyone continued on the normal socialising and tasting each other’s beers – in between those fine tasting Belgians on tap.