December 2023

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas? We’re hoping your holiday season is full of family, friends, and loved ones. LFC wishes everyone a great holiday season.

Monthly Meeting

• Date: December 16th

• Earlier start time: 10 am – 12 pm

• Location: Old 121 Brewhouse

• Address: 1057 S Wadsworth Blvd, Lakewood, CO 80226

The meeting will be packed with Quarterly Scale Up challenge tasting and results AND our annual White Elephant Ingredient Gift Exchange AND announcing the leadership team for next year.

We’ll taste the quarterly challenge entries and hear from each participant about their beer. A reminder for folks to bring in 2-3 additional samples. After tasting we’ll announce the scale up winner.

Additionally, we’ll have our annual White Elephant Ingredient Gift Exchange. This is for our March quarterly (3rd Annual White Elephant Gift Exchange). For those new to this:

• Bring a unique brewing ingredient that is wrapped. Our challenges are designed to get brewers out of their comfort zone. Keep this in mind when purchasing your White Elephant Ingredient. Past examples, Ginger, Rye malt, a new dry yeast, honey, etc.

• We’ll draw numbers and have a White Elephant Exchange. The ingredient you end up with is your ingredient you brew with for our March quarterly challenge.

• If you would rather not participate in this, no worries, just enjoy the fun of this part of our meeting and the gift stealing and laughs.

• If you’re unable to make the meeting and would like to brew for the March quarterly, email Terry and an ingredient will be assigned to you.

Tumblers for Christmas!

Are you still looking for the perfect gift for that special someone? LFC has vacuum insulated stainless tumblers for sale. Very classy, very versatile - put a couple under the tree! $30 for dues paid members, $40 for non-members.

Education Corner

The simplest water adjustment is to use Campden tablets (potassium metabisulfite) in your mash and sparge water to remove chlorine and chloramine. I personally keep this simple and take 1 tablet and break it in two and divide it into my different water vessels prior to heating.

A Campden tablet will remove both chlorine and chloramine (it’s more technical but let’s keep it simple). A common misconception is that the boil will remove both but the boil will only remove chlorine. Most municipal water sources now use chloramine as a disinfectant instead of the more simple Chlorine.  Chlorine/Chloramine in your finished beer can lead to the chlorophenol off flavor which presents as medicinal, plastic band-aid, and smokey phenolics. 

One tablet can treat up to 20 gallons of brewing water. It’s one of the easiest and affordable water adjustments we can make.