Your correspondent had to miss the festivities this year. What follows is a guest post by our leader, Andy Cox.
The holiday season is here and the spirits were high at the joint Brew Haven and Underground Brewers party at Armada Brewing on December 15th.
Some of our party goers got started early at Bob Burger’s house in the filling of the club 55-gallon rye whiskey barrel. Brewing of the Imperial Stout was split up in 5- and 12-gallon batches and brewed by club members. After purging the barrel with C02, we had four lines all pushing the beer to fill up the barrel. The process went off perfectly! We can only hope getting it all out will go as well. Sampling will be Bob’s job over the coming weeks and plans are to brew a Wee Heavy for round #2 – volunteers needed!
Ok, back to the party: we were upstairs at Armada in the same space that hosted SNERHC. Way too much food, beers to sample, and Armada’s excellent line up of beers to try. Great turnout by both clubs and the night ended with Brew Haven’s usual White Elephant gift exchange. Always a good time getting the clubs together.
Lots of plans in the works for 2024: January meeting will be at Valor Wines in North Haven and February at Spacecat in Norwalk. January will also have club elections – posts will go up on the Facebook feed shortly. We are hoping to bring in as many new folks who are willing to serve.
February will also bring the release of Caysey Welton’s SNERHC winning Biere de Garde brewed at Reverie Brewing in Newtown. We are planning a release party at the brewery on Sat February 4th and will invite all the CT homebrew clubs to come on down and join in the fun.
Spring competition season will be here before you know it – Homebrew Alley in NYC, Ocean State in RI, and maybe Hudson Valley will make it back? Lots of opportunities to enter and judge locally coming up.
As always, the full event calendar is up at https://www.undergroundbrewers.org/events/