September 2017 meeting

September’s meeting marked the 1 year anniversary of the first official True Grist gathering. We’ve grown so much from our humble beginnings. A bit of a snap shot of where we’re at:

  • Our website is now averaging around 5k visits/month resulting in nearly 100k page loads. Not only is traffic being driven to our site, but visitors are staying, exploring our resources and participating on our forum.
  • Our social media following and engagement continues to grow (links to our Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook on the sidebar!).
  • 150 users have registered to our site. And amazingly, over 50 of those are due paying members.
  • Our active membership has given us great buying power in our bulk buys, in our first year approximately $10k has been spent on distributor or producer-direct priced hops, malt, yeast, cider, more hops.
  • We have actual logo, and it’s on shirts, glasses, stickers (grab some from our friends Kamil Juices in Guelph and Shortfinger Brewing in KW), and soon baseball caps!
  • The club has a cask to call it’s own – first use of it will be for our participation in Cask days. Future use of it will be whenever we have an excuse (if you want to borrow it for an event, get in touch)!

This meeting we started to play around a bit with our meeting format – having a session of structured tastings following our usual announcements, and first use of a sign up sheet for beers (think open mic style). Many great samples as always! If you want to provide us with some feedback on our evolving format, please open a topic on our forum, email us at or submit anonymous feedback here.

The club has so much going on right now. The first annual True Brewer competition has been announced (sign ups open until September 30th, 2017), we just had our brew day for our submission to the Cask Days Festival in Toronto, our cider bulk buy is ongoing, we’re doing a run of True Grist hats with Creative Embroidery Works, and lots more planned. You can now check out the club’s event calendar for planned recurring events for some hints!