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| December
2004 |
Fermental Order of Renaissance Draughtsmen | Volume
12 Number 12 |
The next meeting will be held back at Bailey's Pub 'N Grille in Dearborn on Tuesday, December 14. Bailey's is located on the southeast corner of Michigan and Mason. Their address is 22091 Michigan Avenue and their phone number is 313-277-3212. As usual, the thirsty hardcore who want dinner will start arriving around 5PM, people will drift in for an hour or so, and we will start our meeting around 6PM.
We will meet in the downstairs lounge again.
The results from last month's competition will be in the next newsletter.
December's competition is Holiday Ales and Irish Red Ale. Category 22, Spice / Herb / Vegetable Beer , has some guidelines for one subset of the Holiday Ale style. The only guide for Irish Red Ale is from the 2004 set of guidelines.
We need volunteers, new blood and help to run the club for 2005 - please let us know if you have the passions to run for any of the offices below!
Article 8 of the Fermental Constitution covers the duties of the club officers, I will paraphrase and add in the other duties of the Chief Executive Officer not found in the chapter.
The President is the chief executive officer and chief administrative officer of the club. The president establishes the meeting sites and presides as chairperson during the meetings. The president has authority to execute contracts based upon Executive Board approval, and co-sign drafts against the treasury. The president also has authority to appoint committees within the club (i.e. Pig Roast committee).
The president represents the club at the monthly (except summer months) FERA General Council meetings. FERA provides a free meal to entice attendance, and a formal Christmas party in December as a reward. The great part of the job is the title, and the knowledge that you are the Big Cheese of one of the countries premier homebrewing clubs. You get your name in lights. Based on recent IRS rulings, the president of FERA clubs must be an active, full-time Ford Motor Company employee.
The most important role of the VP position is to perform the duties of the president in case of absence. The VP is a voting and active member of the executive committee. The Fermentals have also added the duties outside of the constitution such as scheduling and organizing the clubs homebrew contests. This includes maintaining the prize inventory and locating judges.
The vice presidential position has been an excellent way to be involved in the shaping of the club, without all the publicity as the president and secretary.
The person that will hold the position of secretary should be prepared for a multitude of different tasks, taking minutes at executive and regular meetings, writing up minutes and articles for the newsletter, copying and distributing the newsletter via intercompany mail, US mail and profs.
The treasurer collects dues from new members and collects yearly dues from the active members. Deposit moneys into the savings account. Dispense moneys for various expenses (to secretary for newsletters and postage, etc.), for various equipment bought for club use, raffle items bought. Keeps balance of savings account and makes sure the account is up to date.
The librarian position is really three duties. First; maintain the
library and ensure that you keep a record of where the various journals
and books are. Second, raise funds (currently through the 50-50 raffle)
to purchase new titles. All of the library has been funded separately
from the rest of the clubs dues. Third, bring the library to club
meetings and ensure that members are aware of their benefit to use this
resource. That is the basic duties, the rest is up to the individual to
determine what they see as the best method of disseminating important
homebrew information to the club members.
| January 2005 |
Mead, Cider
/ Cyser |
| February |
Sour Beers * |
| March |
TBD |
| April |
Extract * |
| * indicates club only
competition |
|
The John Rucinski and the editor took pictures with their digital
cameras at the recent Holiday party. These pictures are a web edition exclusive.
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Next month's competition styles are mead, cider, and cyser. The new BJCP mead categories can be found for mead(general), traditional mead, melomel, and other meads. The last category includes metheglin and braggot.
The cider categories, 27 and 28, include standard cider and perry as well as specialty cider and perry.
I found this article which I wrote about qbrew five years ago. Qbrew is now up to version 0.3.4 and I've included an up to date screenshot....
For all those masochists who run Linux or some
other Unix like operating system on their desktop computers at home, a
new homebrew brewing recipe calculator ,QBrew, is available. This program, written by David Johnson
(arandir@meer.net), can be found at its home page,
www.meer.net/~arandir/code.html. The file for the most
current version file is qbrew.tar.gz. The most current version is 0.1.0. You will also need the Qt 2.0 library installed
on your system. This library is available from Troll Tech, www.troll.no.
Compiling the program is simple and worked easily on my Red Hat Linux v6.1 system at home.
As to the program itself, please look at the screenshot below. The user can calculate original gravity for all grain mashes, extracts, and everything in between. Hop bitterness is also calculated using Rager's correction for gravity. Utilization factors are from Noonan's book on Lager brewing. The hop utilization rates can be changed by editing a file. Similarly if you don't like a grain extract efficiency or want to add one that the program doesn't have, you can edit the same file. Of course you can change or add grain or hop types in individual recipes ( i.e. you are not limited to the drop down list in the program.
I tested the program against several recipes that I had brewed in the past year and a half. The expected original gravities compare well to what I had calculated by hand. Usually the values were within 0.001. The program seems to give higher IBU values than what I had calculated. This is probably because I calculated the IBU values using a different method and/or different utilization factors.
Anyway, this program is well worth a look for those using a Unix or Unix-like operating system.
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Beer Events, Meetings & Competitions |  |
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Fermental Funny |  |
| Ye Olde Brew
News published by the F.O.R.D. Homebrew Club |
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| Editor: Tony Tantillo Contributors:
Club Officers: |
F.O.R.D. is a private, non-profit organization
of homebrewers. The main goal of this club is to promote awareness and
appreciation of
the quality and variety of beer; to share information regarding
technique,
equipment and skill required to brew quality homemade beer; and to
encourage
responsible use of beer as an alcohol-containing beverage. Howard Klix Jr. 24737 Cushing Ave Eastpointe, MI 48021 Phone: (586) 779-1445 Visit our website at: http://www.be.ford.com/brewers/
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