Cedar Rapids Brewing Society

I'd like to propose another round of off flavor training meetings. The club held a set of them in 2014, and there are a lot of new (and old) members who would benefit from a redo. Please respond with your interest in the poll attached to this topic. If we get enough interest, I'm thinking 10 or more yes's, I'll go ahead and buy a basic off-flavor kit with 6 off-flavors to see how it goes. If it goes well and the group is interested, we can look into buy other kits for follow-on meetings.

Summarizing what we did in 2014:
* Lee Paulsen ordered a kit with 20 off-flavor capsules, which are each dissolved in 1 L of beer.
* They used 40s of Bud Light. Per a comment by user, kjball, "The issue is what contributes to the flavor. Coors Light has acetaldehyde, Busch Light has DMS, High life is grapey. What we're looking for is a clean flavor. I would definitely stick to the lite lager. Miller is probably fine, I'm assuming it is a more premium product than Busch. It is triple hopped, after all." Good enough justification for me.
* Lion Bridge hosted the event. May need to find a new venue in 2022.
* Restricted participation to dues-paying members. Welcome to invite friends, but they must pay dues before attending.

Update on the tech meeting. I set up a date with Lion Bridge to host us on Feb 21, at 7:00 pm. That's a Monday night, so hopefully most people can make it. I think it will take us 1.5-2 hours to get through the 6 flavors.

Also, I have no idea how I managed it, but I ordered the Brewhouse off-flavor sensory kit instead of the Basic kit. I thought MoreBeer! messed up the order, but that's what it says in my confirmation email. My bad. We can either: a) proceed as planned, since it should still prove to be useful, or b) I can return it and re-order the Basic off-flavor kit. If we go with option a, I'm hoping that with a good turnout and enough interest, we can hold a second session with the basic off-flavor kit. The kit I have has the following off-flavors.
Brewhouse Kit https://www.morebeer.com/products/brewe ... house.html

I personally wouldn't mind trying the brewhouse one if that's what we have to work with. But if we're only doing one and there is time to swap them, I'd also like to try the fermentation one because some of those are different than the one we did years ago. But I'd do the basic one again too if that's what other want.

I'm OK with this kit. It's different from the ones that we did before.

Works for me.

There is some discussion among the cabinet members. It sounds like we are good with either swapping this Brewhouse one for the Basic kit or buying a Basic kit and doing both. I'm leaning towards doing both and will likely order the Basic kit soon. Likely will need to have two separate meetings to cover all 12 flavors.

I like the idea of doing both as separate tech meetings.

Ok, update on the location, date, and time of the first off-flavor tech meeting with the Basic flavor kit. Lion Bridge will be hosting us at 7:00 pm on Feb 21st. It's 6 flavors, so we should be able to do it in about 2 hours.

See the update below about the actual date being Feb 23.

They’re opening on a Monday just for us?


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They told me, "That day we have restaurant week and also the release of Tmavy Lezak." They said Feb 21st twice, so it seems real. I'll give them a call tomorrow and confirm.

Feb 23 is the new, correct date. I called Lion Bridge, and it sounds like the person I spoke with on Facebook messenger was confused about the 21st landing on a Monday. We're confirmed for the 23rd. I hope a Wednesday is good for most people. Thanks, and sorry for the confusion.

Actually works out better for me now! Thanks for clearing this up.

Does anyone have plastic pitchers they can bring to the off-flavor training? We'll need to dose 1L volumes of Bud Light, and one or more pitchers are needed.

I can bring a couple.

Thanks, Tony. I'll bring a 1 L measuring cup to measure out the beer before pouring it into your pitchers. I bought a case of Bud Light tallboys, which might work out better than 40s. I'm planning to arrive around 6:45 pm tonight to get a couple of tables set up. Based on the poll, it looks like we can expect about 10 members to show up, so we can either have larger sample pours or have more concentrated samples. We can get a group consensus at the class tonight.

For those who may have missed it:
Basic off-flavor beer sensory training tonight at 7:00pm at Lion Bridge.