Westgate Club Night

Good Beer Week Showcase Gala

This is a great event and will host beers from 30 breweries and food from a number of vendors.

This will be a club night and will cost just $25 for club members, the balance being paid for by the club.
Please RSVP by Sunday 18th Feb (westgatebrewers@gmail.com) and pay $25 per member to the club bank account (include your name) or cash to Grant this Sunday.

PRICE: $50pp, + booking fee ($25 for club members)
VENUE: The Atrium, Federation Square
DATES: Thursday 22 March and Friday 23 March, 5 pm - 9 pm
YOUR TICKET INCLUDES: 20x 60ml tasting tokens, food voucher, RASTAL tasting glass (RRP $15), and chance to vote for Bintani People's Choice

Information here

Beer Sensory Training
 

Ever wondered what that out of place flavour was in your beer and how it got there?
Join us at the March Club Meeting for beer sensory training.
We will spike beer with a range of standardised off-flavours, discuss the flavour and aroma perception, and the cause and cure of these rascally off-flavours.

Not to be missed. Cost is free for club members.

WestgateBrewers Upcoming Events & Competitions

BOTY
This month we have the set recipe comp. This is always an interesting one, seeing how differently each beer tastes from the same ingredients. This is definitely one to make sure you get a taste after the judges and discuss which one you think is the best. Winners will be asked to explain how they brewed their beer so we can all learn something.

If anyone is interested in trying out judging, this is a good one to cut your teeth on because it's only one style to judge!

Melbourne Brewers Beerfest
Entries closed on the 10th February and the comp is on 24 & 25th February in Ferntree Gully. If can want to help out please volunteer and you wont be disappointed. They have an on-site brewery, food trucks and some demos going on as well as the judging.

Merri Mashers IPA Competition
This year The Mashers have started their own online registration system. Go to their website for registration. This year, after some gentle prompting, they have decided that they will be recognising the achievement of brewers that place 2nd or 3rd in each category.  They do offer great prizes and it would be awesome if we could get club of show. If you haven't brewed yet, you still have time.

Entries close 17th March and the comp is on 25th March.

Belgian Beerfest 2018
This comp is on 21st April. Yarra Valley Brewers are one of the smaller clubs and really appreciate any help we can give them. The comp is in Lilydale, which is a bit out of the way for most of us, if you think you can help them please do. Remember that just by entering competitions like this you are helping support our fellow home brew clubs.

Hawkers African Hops Showdown
Recently some of us have brewed some beer with African hops supplied by Hawkers. The idea is that we present our beers at a gathering of the other home brew clubs involved and Hawkers will launch their new IPA made with the same hops. We still don't have a date for this yet but it looks like it will be in the western suburbs sometime around the end of this month. This should be a cracking event! Lots of free beer, friendly rivalries with the other clubs and professional brewers on hand to drink with and learn from. As soon as something is confirmed I will let you all know.

Good Beer Week
I haven't heard anything about any home brew comps this year for Good Beer Week. 

The Showcase Gala is definitely worth attending. It has been discussed before but this is an excellent opportunity for us to have a night on the town. Great beers, talk to the brewers, education sessions and it's only $50 including loads of beers and some food!

Michael Bowron has recently been made a Life Member of Westgate Brewers.
He had a chat to Paul McLaurin.

Paul McLaurin (PM): What inspired you to start brewing, and how did you start?

Michael Bowron (MB): This will go back a long time, ‘cause I think I got started back in the early ‘90s. I was led astray, I was an apprentice at Holden, maybe a second or third year apprentice. I would have been twenty. At the time we were working 7 days a week, sometimes 12 hours a day. One of the people I worked directly with started home brewing because he couldn’t afford to keep himself in beer. On a Sunday, because there was only two or three of us working, he’d bring in a six-pack and we’d have a beer with lunch, and I thought the beer he made was pretty good. In the end, I was cooking a chicken roast in one of the heat treatment ovens and we’d have a Sunday roast and a six-pack of beer.
I can’t remember if I went out and bought it, or whether it was given to me, but I got one of the standard Cooper’s home brew kits, so I started kit & kilo brewing. I did two or three kit & kilos and by that time, the guy that started me, Gary (he’s also a life member of the club, though he doesn’t brew anymore) had joined this club.
So I came along and learned you could do more than kit & kilo, so I switched to extract brewing. Extract brewing is not something most people do, where you buy the bulk extract in 20 kg buckets. Most people (nowadays) go from kit & kilo to brew-in-a-bag, which wasn’t invented then (and makes me sound old). I did extract brewing for a good eight or ten years. I made reasonable beers, and I won a few bits and pieces in comps here and there. I resisted going to all grain for quite a while, until we bought a house, and then I decided to give it a go.
I started with a couple of milk crates and buckets and kettle elements. I did a couple of brews like that and decided this was the way to go, and to formalise it a bit more, and I built my system.

PM:So, what sort of system do you brew on now?

MB: It’s three vessel, effectively single tier, so I use pumps. I’ve got a 110L hot liquor tank which is on a timer, so I can turn that on and have it hot in the morning when I get up. I have an 85L mash tun which I built out of the copper liner from an electric hot water service. I’ve got a 50 and a 30 litre keg welded together (as a kettle). It will hold 75L and I can start a boil at about 60L and so I make about a 50L batch.

PM: What’s the upper-limit for your grain bill on that system:

MB: I can mash a whole bag (25kg) and do a barley wine and a small beer, no problems. The anniversary barley wine that the club did was done as a partigyle* on my system. I did a whole bag, and we did two batches of that and we made 100L of it. On the Saturday I mashed a bag, we made a barley wine and from the second runnings we made an American amber, or something like that. The next day, another 50L of barley wine and an English Bitter.

PM: Be honest, did you have a phase where, in retrospect you proudly subjected friends and family to some pretty bad beer?

MB: I wouldn’t call it a phase, I did have some bad beers, though not many, and I drank them anyway. If any one came around, they got them, but that was in the first year or two. After that I haven’t really had any. Once you get your cleanliness and sanitation down, you very rarely have a bad batch. You’ve got to do something completely wrong.

PM: What’s your go-to brew or style?

MB: I don’t brew many beers repeatedly. I decide I am going to make a beer, and the first thing I do is look at what grain I have. I built a grain mill a couple of years after I built the brewery. It’s probably bigger than the Grain & Grape one, it’s got two 10” rollers, both chain driven.  I repeat recipes, but I don’t typically make the same beer over and over again.

PM: What style of beer would you like to see more available commercially?

MB: I don’t think there is one, to tell you the truth. There’s a few styles that are probably underrepresented, but they are represented in different countries, rather than here.

PM: OK then, what’s a style that you think is underrepresented in the Australian market?

MB: A good wit beer. I don’t see many craft brewers making it. I like alt beer, which is again a style that you don’t see a lot of. I would like to see a return to a malt driven beer over a hop driven beer.

PM: What is the ratio of brewing related fridges you now own against the number of brewing related fridges you once told your significant other would be sufficient?

MB: Well, I’m lower now - I had five fridges at one stage. I now have one beer fridge and one fermentation fridge.

PM: OK, that’s fairly moderate

MB: Right now I’ve got a 1500 litre beer fridge, and I’ve got a 1000 litre fermentation fridge.

PM: Has there been some equipment creep though? Have you at some point said, I’m brewing partly because it’s a cheaper way to consume beer, when ultimately it’s not?

MB: To tell you the truth, most of my equipment has been acquired relatively cheaply. 1500 litre fridge was about $300. I wanted a regulator bank so I could have a couple of temperatures, so I picked up one of the normal board banks that you get in a pub, but I also got a couple of the triple cobras (fonts), a couple of beer taps for $80. I sold the compressor to some guy in Perth, he paid freight and gave me a thousand bucks for that. So in the end I got my regulator bank, and probably made enough money to finance my brewing for a couple of years.

PM: So, are you telling me you’re in the black?

MB: I reckon I am actually. Sponsorship for home brew comps is now at a level where you’re not just getting a glass, but you’re getting hops, malt and yeast. Over the last couple of years, I don’t think I’ve actually bought malt. It’s a great motivation to enter comps!

PM: You’re a Westgate life member now, and congratulations. How has the club changed over the years, and what are some things that more junior members may not know about the club?

MB: We have definitely come a long way. When I joined the club, we were meeting at Blackwood St Neighbourhood House. It was pretty informal, at the time we had a police officer (as one of the members). So we organised to have the breathalysers come along one meeting. Everyone lined up and got tested before the meeting. Everyone made a guess as to what their BAC was at the end of the meeting and then blew in the box. There was a few surprised people there!
We seemed back then to be more proactive in attending competitions with other clubs. You’d have a whole contingent of people who’d go to one of the other competitions to help. Judging wasn’t as formal then, if you could drink beer, stand on two feet and write your own name, then you could judge.

PM: This is a question specifically for you, because some people don’t like showing off their legs, but it seems like you might be the polar opposite of that. So, do you brew in shorts? And if you do, do you take steps, superstitious or otherwise to mitigate against the OHS risks?

MB: No.

PM: That’s a very simple answer!

MB: If you look at my brewing system, I have two pumps, and only one ball valve in the whole system. So I control fluid through the whole system, with speed controllers on all the pumps. If it’s summer, I’ll typically brew in shorts and thongs and as of yet I haven’t had an accident yet. In winter I will be wearing Blundstones, or some sort of boots.

PM: What’s one thing that most brewers, experienced or otherwise could or should change that would result in an instant improvement to their beer?

MB: If they are not oxygenating, they should be doing it, and if they are not making starters, they should be doing it.

PM: Do you make starters, even with dry yeast?

MB: I do. I make 50L at a time, split across two fermenters. One thing I do, when I rack my beer into the fermenter from the boiler, is strain off the 4 or 5 litres left (in the kettle) into a bucket. I boil it, bottle it hot and that’s my wort for starters.

PM: Last question. If Westgate Brewers were in charge of your headstone, what might it say?

MB: He never wore pants? I don’t know.

PM: We might need something in brackets to say “he wore shorts though, it’s not as though he was brewing in the nuddy”

MB: True. I do wear long pants though, at weddings and funerals. Unless I’m allowed to wear shorts to a wedding.

PM: OK, Michael. Is there anything else you’d like to say?

MB: I think the club is going in the right direction. It’s a dynamic group and over the last couple of years we’ve got a lot of new members and younger members and I think it’s all good from here. I still think this life membership thing is a little bit strange. I mean I’ve got grey hair, but shit, I don’t think that I’m that old.

PM: Thank you very much Michael!
 
*Partigyle refers to a technique where multiple beers are made from a single mash

 

 

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