Our May meeting will be at O’Keefes (1331 5th Ave, Moline, Illinois 61265) on May 21st from 2-5 PM in the pavillion area. Allison is revisiting yeast for education, with a foucs on more advanced topics. Bring your best fermentations to share with friends. See you there! -John

Our April meeting will return to Radicle Effect Brewerks, 2PM-5PM. This is the Juniper beer challenge event. Bring your Juniper beer and we will see who’s is the winner, who has the most unique and perhaps whom overdid the juniper. 😉 We will also go over Big Brew Day since it will be the weekend following our meeting. See you there! -John

For our March meeting Rick Harris of Bootleg Hill Honey Meads will be giving us an education on Mead making, giving the group an update on the Meadery progress and giving us some great samples to try. We will be meeting at Endless Brews, 2-5 PM. Bring your latest brews to share. See you there!

-John

For our February meeting we will be meeting at Baked Beer & Bread in the East Village, 2-4 PM on 2/26. This will be our “swap” meet. Do you have excess gear you don’t use anymore? Bring it to the meeting and swap/donate/sell it to your fellow club members. We will also be rafflng off a brand new thermometer that Rich donated to the club.

Allison will also be leading a discussion on yeast basics, which is always a good reminder for both new and old folks.

Should be a fun a meeting. Look forward to trying some new beers as well, so bring what you got going.

John

Mugz Meeting Minutes
Date: 1/29/17
Location: Rebellion Brew Haus

Dues

Dues were collected, $30 for a single person, $40 for a couple. If you did not come to this month’s meeting, seek out Nate, our Treasurer, at February’s meeting to pay dues.
Land of the Muddy Waters

November 11th will be the date for Land of the Muddy Waters home brew competition. Brice is looking for volunteers to help set up donations and other behind the scenes items to continue the success of Land of the Muddy Waters competition. Talk to Brice at next meeting to help out.

Mobile Tapping Stand
We received a $100 donation to the club from Cedar Rapids Beer Nuts for support of their festival. We are considering investing the donation to create a mobile tapping
stand / bar for future events which MUGZ serves beer at. Next meeting we will have the second and final vote to approve this use of MUGZ funds.

Homebrew Con 2017
The American Homebrewers Association (AHA) is having their annual convention, Homebrew Con, on June 15 – 17 in Minneapolis. If you are not a member, joining is easy and you get a free monthly magazine. Several people from the club are planing on going, so join the fun and come along for a whole weekend of hombrewing.
American Homebrewers Association: https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/
Homebrew Con 2017: http://www.homebrewcon.org/
The window for the National Homebrew Competition entries opens at the close of the month, so make sure you are a member, subscribe for emails and pay attention if interested. Would love to see some of you making the rounds and getting those medals.

Mystery Mash
This month we gave out 1oz packages of juniper berries as part of a friendly brewing competition. Contestants will add them to a brew over the next few weeks and bring back the results in for our April meeting. Where we all will get to taste and judge the final product. There will be 2 finalist picked Best Beer and Most Interesting. Winners will receive gift cards to U-Brew.

Swap Meet
The club will be hosting a swap meet for beer equipment in the next few months. Be on
the look out for the upcoming meeting where you can bring the equipment you don’t use anymore and trade it for something you can use.

Raffle
Next meeting we will be raffling off a donated kettle thermometer with the proceeds going to the club.

Eric’s Education Topic
This month’s topic was No Sparging. Sparging is the process of washing/draining the grains after you mash to extract the sugars from the grain to produce your wort. No sparging saves time because you can skip this step, but because you are not extracting all the sugars from the grain you need to use about 25% more grain to get your extra sugars. Also this removes the possibility of over sparging and can be done in a brew bag if you don’t have an all grain set up.