Bubblings From the Fermenter
By Mark Tumarkin

The pre-meeting dinners continue to get better and better each month. It's hard to pick favorites from all the wonderful food, but a trend seems to be emerging. Dave Perez seems to be the crowd-pleaser for the main dishes with his great Thai food, while Richard Furlong wins hands down in the dessert department. Last month he brought a walnut pie made with oatmeal stout, while this months sweet delight was a Berry-misu made with mead and Kir. That doesn't mean that the other food isn't good - far from it! So if you haven't been making it in time for the dinners, give it a try at the next meeting.

Jamie and Robert, by the way, will host the next meeting. This will be their last Gainesville fling before they head to West Virginia for their wedding. Sounds like their nuptial celebrations are going to be awesome. Picture a fall mountainside, by a river, bagpipers to play the wedding march, and enough homebrew to qualify as a beer festival. Let's put it this way; even Robert (the refrigerator king of Gainesville) doesn't have enough cold space to ferment and store all the beer they're making. He and Jamie have been brewing every weekend in anticipation of the coming wedding. It's going to be a great party; sorry I won't be able to make it. Congratulations to them both!

Did you have fun on our Savannah Road trip? Or were you one of the unlucky folk who missed that adventure? Either way, you've got another chance to get in on another Hogtown Brewers Road Trip/Pub Crawl adventure. We'll be taking the short trip down to Lady Lake (just south of Ocala) to visit Spanish Springs Brewing on Saturday, Sept. 22nd. Buzz, the brewer, will be there to talk with us about his beer and will be offering us some great happy hour pricing. We'll be gathering at my house at 3:00 and leaving shortly thereafter. Hope you can join us.

Dave Perez brought up the possibility of having Hogtown Brewers host a homebrew competition. He has had experience organizing marital arts competitions and is willing to use that expertise in organizing a homebrew competition. I think it's a great idea, but it will require the same sort of teamwork as putting on the Medieval Faire. There would be a lot of work and everyone would need to pitch in. You don't need to be a beer judge to participate; we'll need lots of stewards, organizers, people to check in the beer, etc. All the Florida homebrew competitions are now held between January and July; so I'm thinking an early fall time frame, probably in October, would work great. Robert suggested starting out with an AHA Club-only Competition. This would give us the opportunity to gain some experience on a smaller event. Our Hogtown judges have been very good about traveling to help at the other FL competitions, so I think we could expect the other clubs to reciprocate. Anyhow, it's something to think about. Competitions are a lot of fun, and it just might be time to start our own.

This month's style contest was on American Pale Ales and IPAs. The winner was Dave Williams with an American Pale Ale. Congratulations to Dave! Next month we will be doing Kolsch & Alt (Category 8) and Light Ales (Category 3), followed by Mead (25) and Cider (26), and then the final category for this year's BOTY competitions will be Brown Ale (10). So until then, keep those fermenters bubbling.

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