Events
We are constantly discussing club competitions, brewery tours, a trip on the Real Ale Train and club brew days. If you would like to suggest an event please feel free to mail us with details. If you want to organise a trip for fellow club members all the better.
Coming up
Woking Beer Festival in November. Triple fff trip on the 6th of December. Check out the forum for more details.
Past Events
Real Ale Train Revisited - Same formula as last time but only four intrepid drinkers. Bowmans and Triple fff breweries supplied the beer this time. The "Swift One" was superb and the "Elderado" went down well with the female contingent!
Real Ale Train - Located on the Watercress Line in Hampshire, the Real Ale Train is probably the longest bar in the UK if not the world. The formula is very simple; take one steam train, add real ale from various brewies, sell a few hundred tickets then drag your slowly inebriating punters up and down a private stretch of railway line until closing time!
Sara, Vic, Tom, Jon and Phil met up at the Railway Arms for a livener or two before boarding the train for the evening. It must have been a good night as all but one beer sold out. We had a cracking night and are already talking about a return trip when the Triple fff brewery is supplying the beer later on in the year.
Thanks to Tom for getting hold of the tickets.
CBA Festival (Derby) - Andy and I (Phil) pitched up at the Derby festival in time for the Friday night pub crawl and were joined by Sara on the Saturday for the festival proper. We met quite a few of the brewers from Jim's forum and sampled quite a few brews between us. What a fantastic weekend! If you get a chance to go to a homebrew festival you should do it. Every beer has a sheet of judges comments beside it. Don't just concentrate on the high scoring ones though. There's more to learn from sampling the beers with faults so you can spot them in your own beers!
Hogs Back Brewery Tour - 1st March 2008, 11:00 AM. Andy, Steve, Vic, Jon and Phil had a tour of the brewery and a few tastings. All except Phil then went on to a pub and by all accounts had a pretty drunken afternoon. Thanks Andy for organising it. When can we go again?
Club Competition - 27th of November 8pm at the Queens Arms, Basingstoke. 1.050 Dry Stout of your own recipe. Judging was carried out by all attending members. Highest score and the winner's tankard went to Steve Djurovich. Well done Steve on a beautifully balanced beer!
Winchester University Fresher's Week - The club was invited to run a workshop at Winchester University during fresher's week, September 2007. 3 of us trotted over to Winchester on the 20th of September and gave a presentation and demo of homebrewing to some keen students. Unfortunately, due to a last minute room change, not all of the expected attendees turned up but the few who did were keen and asked plenty of questions.
We took along a few gallons of a 1.064 Porter to show the kind of beers that can be brewed at home. We did, however, get a little worried when it turned out that 75% of the audience liked pale ales and the other one (yes there were only 4 of them) was a wine drinker! That said, the porter went down well with the beer drinkers amongst them.
The demo itself entailed brewing a 3kg best bitter kit as simply as possible. This proved interesting as none of us had brewed a kit for years or possibly decades!! I think the highlight of the demo was watching Jon aerate the brew by shaking the 5 gallon fermenter. I believe there's a picture somewhere on Vic's camera. I we find it I'll stick it up here your enjoyment!
While the lack of attendees was disappointing we enjoyed the day and would definitely do it again if asked.