For our October 2019 meeting, we were at Short Finger Brewing Co. in Kitchener. The club set up in the SFBC taproom to run through our monthly announcements, and other regular meeting activities. It turned out that October 9th, 2019 was Canada’s first National Beer Day. The Club celebrated taking a group photo with a Canadian Flag before the meeting got into full swing.

For this meeting we had a presentation from Rob Hern, owner and brewer at SFBC on blending. Rob approaches his blending with specific goals in mind, such as the common spirit across his various batches of Lando. He goes on to claim that, blending bad beers together doesn’t yield good beer – though beer/blending stock that is overly phenolic, overly acidic, etc. has its uses. Rob continued to discuss a bit about barrel – care and ideologies. He suggests when using barrels to either keep them full or empty. If only a portion of a barrel is required for a specific blended beer, then the rest of that barrel’s contents should be stored in stainless until it is used. Barrels can be cleaned and filled with storage solution following instructions on Milk the Funk. Rob answered a bunch of questions from the True Grist audience before we moved on to the Homebrewer’s Social portion of the meeting.

We were excited at this meeting to have a bunch of 2019 Crop Tavistock Hops delivered. We smashed these up on one of SFBC’s stainless tables to smell and assess in preparation for a group order of some of this ultra-fresh, ultra-local product. Around a dozen of our members had toured the Tavistock facilities 2 months prior during the harvest, and we’re eager to get brewing with some of these just-analyzed hops!

We’ll be back at SFBC in December, for a special holiday True Grist event! We plan to once again raise money for a local charity at this meeting through a raffle. This year we will be raising money for The Working Centre. More details to come. 

Don’t forget to sign up for our annual homebrew advent exchange, True Brewer, and bring your bottles to swap to our November meeting. There’s only a couple weeks remaining to sign up!