May 2002 Executive Committee Minutes
By Mark Tumarkin
This was a full and hopefully productive meeting. The main topic discussed was the Hogtown Social Calendar. We are attempting to have a full social calendar of events, spread out though the year. See May Meeting Minutes in this newsletter for the schedule.
Also of importance is new officers/committee leaders. We have voted to impeach George for dereliction of duties and replace him as Secondary Fermenter with Greg McGann. Unfortunately, we neglected to do this at the last meeting. We'll have to plan an official ceremony for the June meeting. Richard (not Pushaw) Furlong has accepted the new position of Competition Czar. It will be his duty to keep track of upcoming competitions and 'encourage' (as forcefully as necessary) Hogtown Brewers to enter their brews. To make this a bit easier, the club will pay for shipping to competitions. We have a number of brewers who can truly uphold the club's honor in competition - just look at the results over the last few months. So factor that into your brewing schedule and let's start entering more beers in regional competitions.
We also discussed updating the list of books and magazines in the club library. We will post this on the web site, and hopefully encourage more use of this terrific resource. Please make suggestions of titles you'd like to see added to the library.
Several people have voiced suggestions concerning the Style Presentation/Tastings. We seem to have drifted away from the Presentation component. More emphasis will be placed on brewing & recipe issues, history, etc. We encourage the presenters to have info (such as recipe sheets, etc) that can be given out as part of the presentation. Written summaries to be included in the newsletter are also encouraged. In addition, we have grown these tastings to the point where there are too many examples presented. We will try to limit examples to 10-12 at most. This way there will be more time to taste and appreciate each beer. It has gotten to the point where you have to slam down each sample to empty your glass for the next one coming around. Hopefully, more time and attention can be given to each beer; we've had some great beers presented without being able to give them the attention they deserve.
One of Ziggy's issues is to encourage brewers to brew - more often, together, etc. To this end, the suggestion was made to start a 'Who's Brewin', What, When, Where' page on the website. So start letting Ziggy know your brewing plans, especially if you'd like to put out an open invitation for club members to join you.