Our last meeting was held on Wednesday, January 28th at our favorite meeting spot, Chelsea's. Rich Byrnes, our venerable president, started the meeting with "Hooray for Colorado, shame on Clinton!". From there, the meeting sunk quickly.

The Ann Arbor Brewers Guild (AABG) has invited both the Pontiac Brew Tribe and the F.O.R.D. club to assist them with organizing and judging the Michigan State Fair this year. The fair is somewhere near the end of August. The AABG has been doing this for many moons now and they could use some assistance.

Both Doug Geiss and myself have volunteered to assist with the fund raising and prize gathering for the State Fair winners. If anyone has some contacts with brew pubs or distributors, let Doug or I know. We would be appreciative. Sponsors will fund a category or style.

Two of our faithful suppliers have apparently gone out of business. Both St. Clair Brewing Co., and Homebrew Supply have gone to that great krausen in the sky and are no longer with us. As the meeting got later, my notes got worse. Something about Atwater having some sort of discount program for us, but I will have to revisit thatfor the next newsletter.

The club is discussing the purchase of a NO2 Stout regulator and tap system to become part of the club's tapsystem. Don't neglect taking advantage of utilizing the club's bar for your own party. Or fire up the club's PICO. I brew fairly consistently and would be glad to help someone through their first PICO brew session.

I brought a selection of barleywines for club members to enjoy. Mark George over at Wine Barrel Plus gave the club several older barleywines to try. Two were brewed by John Haberman. The first, a '93, had a cork in the bottle as well as a cap on the top. This undoubtedly helped reduce the potential for oxidation, but everyone was turned off by the intense cork flavor it imparted. John's '94 however, was a sweet, syrupy BW that elicited a much more favorable response.

A Belgian BW was accused of being, well, too Belgian. The spicy flavors overcame the normally aggressive barley and hop profile. However, people warmed up to the Rogue BW and everybody loved the '95 Bigfoot Barleywine. Thank you, Mark!

I also unloaded some excess hops and tubing and Mike from Merchant's Dearborn also had hops available, although his were free! Good job tightening up the Merchants store, Mike!

The collective, elected board of the F.O.R.D. club met in early February to discuss the current state of the club and to review where we hoped to go in 1998. The general consensus was that we wanted to remain involved in the activities of yore (picnic, Stroh's festival, public demonstrations, competitions, education, monthly meetings,etc.), and we hoped to get the F.O.R.D. club involved in more. More competitions outside the club, meeting with more clubs, learning and teaching more about brewing, and purchasing more items for the club members to enjoy!

We discussed purchasing a jockey box. What is a jockey box, you might ask? It is a Coleman-type cooler with fifty feet of stainless steel tubing that winds around inside the cooler, attached to a tap (or two or three). One can fill it with ice and water and serve cold beer even on the hottest days from your Corny kegs.

The date for the club's picnic (Beer-B-Q) has been determined; August 1st. This will put a week between the Stroh's Rivertown Beer Festival and the picnic. Last year it got a bit too close for many member's schedules.

Mark your calendar for Saturday, May 2nd, is National Homebrew Day. Mike at Merchants has already indicated that they would like to participate in a homebrew demonstration. If you want to be part of this event, let me know and I will help organize everyone. And for our retailers, if you want a homebrew demonstration this year from some of our club members, let me know. My phone number at work is 313-337-1642 and at home is 734-944-6618.

The next meeting will be held at Chelsea's on Tuesday, February 24th. For those of you who are new to the club, Chelsea's is located on Van Born between Telegraph and Southfield (midway, on the North side). Their address is 22120 Van Born and their phone number is 313-278-0888. The competition is Mild and Brown Ales. As usual, the thirsty hard-core who want dinner will start arriving around five, people will drift in for an hour or so, and by 6:00ish, we will start our meeting.

Winter is a perfect time for brewing, reading, and reading about brewing. As most of you know, our club has a really good library full of recipe books, brewing books as well as general books on brewing. We added some books last year, and I am planning on getting some more. We also get Brewing Techniques and Zymurgy magazines that can be checked out, and we have older issues of several other magazines.

Find me at the beginning of meetings to check out materials, I normally won't start bugging you to return them for at least a month. (Those of you who do have books out and are finished with them, please return them). Also, if there is a book you think should be added to the library, let me know. This is YOUR library! Here is the current list:

Membership Dues for 1998 David Peters

It is that time of year. We are in the midst of the annual dues collection. To date only about one third of our club has paid their 1998 dues. This in part is due that people have been unable to attend the meetings. Therefore, I am suggesting an alternative way to pay your dues. Please send your dues to my home address as follows:

David Peters
39777 London Court
Northville, MI 48167

Make check payable to David Peters (check only please, no cash). Upon receipt of your check, I will mail your new club discount card. The old cards expired at the end of January.

Please let me know if you do not intend to re-join. At the end of March we will be taking members off the mailing and distribution lists who have not paid their dues.

Have you ever sat around waiting for your wort to reach the right temperature? You need something that will measure the temperature of the wort/beer while it's in the carboy. I'm sure you've tried the stick on liquid crystal type thermometers from the local pet store. The problem is that they have a very limited range and cost at least $3 each.

Well, today's your lucky day! The temperature strips that I have found come in 3 temperature ranges with 2 degree increments (26-56F, 58-88F and 90-120F) and cost $1.35 each. I use all three on my fermenters. That way I can tell when to pitch the yeast and what the temperature is doing while fermenting or lagering. There's also one that goes from 100-220F in 10 degree increments and costs $1.50 each. That one might come in handy on your boiling kettle. The size of each strip is ½" X 5". If you would like to order any of these temperature strips, please contact me at GSHEWCHU inside Ford, gshewchu@ford.com for outside e-mail, or talk to me at the next meeting.

Well, as promised, here's part two in a continuing series of articles about internet resources for homebrewers. Last month highlighted the Homebrewers Digest, a mail list. This months feature is Rec.Crafts.Brewing (RCB), a newsgroup. Whereas the HBD is a daily mailing that is fed to you, RCB is a dynamic, live forum that is constantly changing. The following instructions are for Netscape users. I don't know how newsgroups are accessed with Internet Explorer. On Compuserve I remember using usenet as a keyword, not sure about AOL. After you follow the directions below to set up the newsgroups, I will detail what they are and how to view and use them.

A side by side comparison of three of the best Michigan-made brown ales...

The Beers:
Motor City Nut Brown Ale Motor City Brewing Works 470 West Canfield Detroit, MI 48201 313-832-2700 http://www.mich.com/mcbw/	Duster's Classic Brown Ale Duster's Microbrewery 114 North Main Street Lawton, MI 49065 616-624-3771 http://www.phd.msu.edu/bice /beer/Dusters_info.html	Bell's Best Brown Ale Kalamazoo Brewing Company 355 E. Kalamazoo Ave. Kalamazoo, MI 49001 616-382-2338 http://www.concentric.net /~kazoodan/bells.html
Looks & Taste:
Nice, warm brown color. Good head retention with lots of bubbles. Low hops aroma with a slight citrusy/fruity aroma. A medium bodied beer that has an initial taste of bitterness that dissipates quickly, leaving a nice mild chocolate malt flavor; a quick sweetness that ends dry.	Darker than the other two. Almost a black color with a red tint and a thick, creamy, brown head that looks like meringue. This beer starts with a wonderful floral hops aroma. The flavor is dominated by a sweet, creamy, chocolatey flavor balanced well with just enough hops without being obtrusive. Very smooth.	Reddish-brown in color with a thick foam of tight bubbles. A sweet, malty aroma with some fruity esters. The flavor begins with a creamy, malty, chocolatey taste followed by a slightly dry, hoppy aftertaste. Just enough hop bitterness in theaftertaste to balance the whole beer out.
Ratings (out of 5):
Quaffable Quotes: "I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer." -Homer Simpson

What to do with the spent grains you now have from brewing:

If you want to be kind to the earth and that steaming pile of sodden spent grain is giving you twinges of eco-guilt, don't go pawning copious loaves of spent grain bread on your friends and loved ones, they can't even get their freakin' dog to eat the stuff!!

Besides the obvious use of spent grain in the compost pile, some more creative uses of spent grain are:

• Place a bag of it on your neighbor's porch, light it on fire, ring the bell and run like hell!!
• Oven dry the stuff and use it as the main ingredient in making home-made Depends for your cherished elderly parents.
• Mix it with asphalt and patch the cracks in your driveway!
• Fill a Zip-lock sandwich bag with it and stuff it in your shorts as 'padding' for that special night on the town.
• Mix it with Parmesan cheese and milk for realistic fake vomit.
• Fill a Pinata with it and take it to a TEX/MEX party.
• Take a large sack of it labeled "AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS FROM FLORIDA" and drive across the California border with it on your front seat. They will confiscate it from you!
• If you cover your car with spent grain, the bird droppings will wash right off!
• For $1 you can fill a locker with 100 pounds of the stuff at the greyhound bus station and just walk away!
• Mix it with a little paste to create your own paper mache' nativity scene for Christmas.
• Its rumoured that if you fill the case of a MAC Power PC with the stuff, it will run twice as fast!!
• If you fill plastic milk jugs with spent grain and hang them on stakes in your yard, dogs will no longer crap on your lawn.
• Fill your bird feeder with the stuff and watch the squirrels get really pissed off!