On the day after our great 2013 Doug King Homebrew competition, we had the Falcon’s January Shop brew.  This month, the brew crew was led by the MF VP Ed Kochanowski, aka Jersey.    The duties of a brew crew leader are to supply a recipe,  help the crew members to enjoy their experience with all-grain brewing by guiding them  through the steps of  grain milling, doughing in, mashing,  sparging, boiling, hop adding, cooling, carboy filling, oxygenating,  yeast pitching,  and equipment cleaning.   Also the crew leader collects the costs for the ingredients and pays the shop.   The final task

I will leave the specifics to the President and VPs to tell everyone about today's DKM, but I would just like to say a giant thank you to everyone who took time out of their day to come and participate in our event.  We had 40 or so judges and 15 stewards who did a fantastic job.  I want to say a special  thanks to Steve Scott for taking care of the keg and growler pours for the entire time.

I am exited to atend my first club meeting tomorrow January 6 2013. I got a good feeling about this:)

Brad Smith of BeerSmith fame had me on his show last week to talk SMaSH and the beauty of simplicity. 

Check it out! Beer Smith Blog: Single Malt and Single Hop (SMASH) with Drew Beechum – BeerSmith Podcast #51

If you have any questions or want to tell me how horribly wrong I am, let me know in the comments below!

Yahoo Finance create a list of beer brands that have suffered drastic sales slides since 2006.

Their sales analysis didn't include craft beers or the malternatvie segment, but instead looking at major brands. It is interesting to see that of all the brands to take a hit, the biggest percentage loss belongs to Michelob which from dropped from 2006's 500,000 barrels to 2011's 140,000 barrels or MGD with the biggest volume loss of 1.7 million barrels!

Enjoyed a wonderful Stone IPA.  Called Enjoy by 12/21/12. 

Not very bitter, it has a rich malt profile with an intense hop aroma and flavor. 

http://www.7x7.com/los-angeles/atwater-village

Rocky and I have emptied our sour barrel and now have about 18 gallons of it. Seeing as we have so much of it we thought it would be fun to do a blend, using this beer as a base. I would like to invite any brewers with sour, funky, or unusual beers to participate. I would like to end up with 5 gallons of finished blend so we have enough to age and share. Please comment on this post if you are interested in participating. The way I see it, we should all meet up some where with at least a 22oz sample and go from there.

http://www.instructables.com/id/beer-advent-calendar/

Count down to the holidays with a special calendar that reveals a different beer every day. The beer advent calendar adds a little mystery to your holiday drinking. There are 24 days in most advent calendars, but mine is 25 - because if there is any day when you're going to want a beer I think it would be the 25th.

Dearest Falcons!
I just wanted to thank each and everyone of you for taking the time to bring a toy to our 4th Annual Spark of Love Toy Drive. We collected  3 giant Hefty bags full of toys for the children. We delivered them to the Fire Department on Fallbrook. They were truly astounded to see how many toys we were unloading from the car. They asked us to thank all of you for your generosity.  

Someone found an "expert" to talk about Champagne beers.

http://www.sfgate.com/wine/brew/article/Mixing-fizz-hops-blurs-the-wine-...