About Us
Welcome to the wonderful world of homebrewing! We are a loose and eclectic group and welcome all interested brewers. Currently, our membership is especially young. We meet every other month on the third Saturday, normally starting at 6:30. Location varies. The way to stay current with what is happening is by joining our brew-list.
You don’t have to be a member to read/contribute, but this is the best way to find out when and where meetings/activities are.
Becoming a Member:
Membership is only $5.00 per year (yep, that’s five dollars) and due when joining and then every December.
Activities:
Our typical year goes like this: Feb, June, Aug, we brew at least one 5 gallon batch of beer together and have a business meeting to discuss what we want to do in the upcoming months. Then in April, August, and December, we have a very abbreviated business meeting and drink the beer made at the previous meeting. August and Dec. are official “parties” with the club springing for some of the food. We also encourage brewers to bring some of their creations to sample and show off at all meetings. We are pretty low key. Our membership fluctuates throughout the years. Right now (2008) we have a fairly new influx of younger members who are actively brewing.
We are involved in several activities through out the year. Writing this up looks a bit overwhelming, but many of these activities have developed and grown through the years and are really very little effort to pull off:
First in the year is the microbrew festival at Caras Park put on by the Missoula Downtown Association in the spring (I think May). We help with organizing, beer judging, and promoting our club.
We also help out with the beverage competition at the Western Montana Fair in August. We encourage our members to submit beers, wines, and liqueurs (our club officially includes wine and mead making but few, if any, are currently doing that) and then we organize the judging. We’re trying to keep it as professional as possible and have been getting Big Sky to judge the beers and recently Ten Spoons to do the wine. We also do a beer brewing demo on Saturday of the fair.
Maybe the most exciting thing we are doing now is working with Big Sky Brewing on the Community Brew (this was a club initiated project!). Big Sky selects a style of beer and then club members compete to develop a recipe and brew a batch of beer that “wins” in that category. The winning brewer then gets to go to Big Sky and help them (or just watch) brew a batch of that beer on a commercial scale. The Community Brew is only sold in the tasting room with proceeds split between a local charity (we help select) and the Zoo City Zymurgists. Big Sky saves one keg to sell to us so that we can sell it at the MDA microbrew festival.
Some other things that are in the works, or potential, are “field trips” to different breweries. In 2007, we rented a bus and went down to Bitterroot Brewing in Hamilton.
Several of our members are just beginning to work on getting certified in beer judging. We just started doing some of our own “competitions” to encourage brewing to specific styles and then “judging” them.
Our new club president, Nathan Boot, has some ideas of getting people together to brew – whenever.
We also do a bit of fundraising by selling T-shirts with our logo. Between the T-shirts, Community Brew proceeds split, and proceeds from that beer sales at the brewfest, we are able to have fun while keeping dues at a ridiculously low level.