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Well that was massive few days in Melbourne for the National competition and conference! The traveling party is still recovering so I’ll keep this update short and provide a full report in the near future.

SABC had another great showing at AABC picking up ~10 trophies. (I honestly lost count!) A big congratulations go to Kam Simsek/Mark Woods for winning Champion Brewer/s!

SA did fantastic at an overall state level earning equal points with Victoria, but ultimately coming 2nd on count back. A huge achievement considering Vic had home ground advantage!

SABC also picked up yet another win at club night. This year it was best costume for our outrageous rainbows and unicorns theme. Check out the SABC Facebook group for some amusing photos!

Hi Members,

Plenty is happening with your club with some updates below. There are more projects in planning with details to be released at a later date. As always we are open for feed back and/ or ideas via info@sabrew.com or simply approach one of the committee members. Cheers N Beers.

October Meeting.

NOTE this months meeting, Wednesday 19th, will be held at Shapeshifter Brewery 2/54 Crittenden Rd, Findon SA 5023. Carla will be presenting a talk about IPA/hops. Please RSVP to the facebook event so we can advise Shapeshifter of numbers. Those not on Facebook can email info@sabrew.com.

Australian National Homebrew Conference.

This will be held 14th – 15th October in Melbourne and tickets are still available. www.anhc.com.au. We will be representing the club in an “unique” way on Saturday club night. There is an active messenger group for information – contact Mark Woods on FB or at info@sabrew.com if you wish to be involved in the shenanigans.

SABSOSA and AABC.

All SABSOSA final placings and scoring will be posted soon. Australian Amateur Brewing Championship awards will be presented at Deeds Brewery on Thursday night 13th October. Good luck to all those that made it in to the National competition, word is the entries were shipped with much care and have arrived for judging.

Barrel Project.

Luke Dat Beard has pulled a rabbit out of the hat for this one! Pirate Life will supply the Skycity brewery, pro-brewers for questions, ingredients and will ferment on site.
All financial members of the club will be welcome to join Pirate Life for a brew day to brew the beer. The beer will be branded SABC + Pirate Life ,pro labeled and bottled. A bottle will be provided to each paid member of the club and then will be for sale at Pirate Life. Save Saturday 19th of November for this awesome day. RSVP is a must for this event for venue capacity reasons see Facebook event or if you must email at info@sabrew.com.

Teams Challenge and November Meeting.

Most areas have had their brew days and the results will be interesting indeed. Dermott from BeerCo will attend our meeting on the 16th of November at The Wheaty. Captains of the teams please bring enough of the challenge beer to share with all meeting attendees. Dermott has been very generous for an interstate club so please support him where you can.

Summer Club Competition.

Trans-Tasman Summer Comp. The closing date is 27th Jan and judging on Sunday 29th Jan. Theme is Trans-Tasman and so all the ingredients where possible need to be from either Australia or New Zealand. The categories are listed below, and there is an experimental category for anything special you want to try.

CATEGORIES 1A – American (Australian) Light Lager
1B – American (Australian) Lager
18A – Blonde Ale
12B – Australian Sparkling ale
X5 – New Zealand Pilsner
18B – NZ/AUS Pale Ale (American Pale Ale but must use native ingredients)
21A – NZ/ AUS IPA (American IPA but must use native ingredients)
21C – Hazy IPA
34C – Experimental Beer (for all other creations. Get creative with native AUS/NZ ingredients). 

Bluestone Yeast Pre-order.
Beerbelly regularly support our club through sponsorship and are willing to bring in a shipment of Bluestone yeast, allowing us to try this Australian liquid yeast without worrying about shipping conditions and costs. Just in time for the summer comp! This is a company in Victoria that provide quality liquid yeast that has been used in commercial breweries, such as the Wheaty, who have been impressed by the quality of the fermentations and the viability of this liquid yeast coming from interstate rather than internationally like Whitelabs or Wyeast. If you would like to pre-order any of their strains, please contact Nick at nick.hauschild@gmail.com who will collate a list. Please get in touch by 7th October if you’re interested. For a list of the strains available please see: https://bluestoneyeast.com.au/#strains.

10yr Anniversary Dinner.

As communicated the date is set for Saturday the 10th of December. Plenty happening in the background with lots more details to come as confirmed.

We’ve barely taken a breath after SABSOSA, but the September meeting is already upon us. We invite any members who placed in SABSOSA to bring along a sample of their winning entries to the Wheaty on Wednesday so they can share it with their fellow members. (don’t forget you entry for AABC as well!)

Another huge announcement to be made this meeting- no hints, you’ll need to be there to find out.

The team challenge with ingredients sponsored by BeerCo is underway. If you have taken photos/stories from team brew days please share them via the Facebook group. The western suburbs based A team put their brew down Saturday using the unique ingredient of hawthorn berries.

Welcome to 10 years of SA Brewing Club

Dear Members past and present.

Firstly I would like to acknowledge the past efforts of Brad, Julien , Clinton and most recently Gus as Presidents of this club. They collectively have built a strong club with great values of Companionship, Knowledge, Participation and Inclusion.

I can already see these values in the current committee who have really blown me away with their talents and enthusiasm. We should all look forward to a full year of activities.

Here are a few of these activities to look forward too

– SABSOSA is just around the corner, put your entries in and if you can help on the days we can always do with extra hands
– Guest speakers have been organised for October and November, September will allow us to recap on SABSOSA and prepare for ANHC.
– Summer comp has an ANZAC theme
– Group Challenge has already been announced, details and ingredients will be released at the September meetings, but get your group together. See Facebook for details
– 10 year Dinner, details available shortly.. Just keep Dec 10 available
– BeerBQ and Winter Comp are committed too
– Luke Beard is being very tight lipped at the moment in regards to the barrel project .. but its WOW!

I hope everyone gets something special out of the club, please let me know if you have any ideas new or areas of improvement.

Cheers

Gary Waters
0417 893 321

As mentioned last week, the committee is putting together a special event to celebrate the clubs 10th anniversary. We now have a date confirmed, so please mark Saturday December 10th in your calendars for an evening dinner and plenty of homebrew. More details and event tickets will be released in due course.

I was pleased to nominate Julien Gibson for SA Brewing Club Life Membership at the AGM last week. It was seconded and passed without opposition. As he was unable to be there, the award will be presented at a meeting in the future.

There’s a theory of clubs and groups that says, for every 100 people in a group, nine will be active and one person will be super-active. Julien Gibson is SABC’s one. He has been a key member of our club since its inception and puts a lot in to make it run well. 

He oversaw the club’s transformation from a group of homebrewers to an incorporated club.

Introduced a modern cashless and online membership system — said to be one of the first brewing clubs to offer it. This reduces the workload for everyone else from the treasure down.

We have a shop to manage and buy club merchandise.

Our website is never down and is an important feature in presenting what the club is to the interested outsider.

He has set up and managed the competition portal for all our club competitions and SABSOSA is also said to be the first in Australia to do so.

He is the club’s public officer to keep us legal and within the associations’ laws.

He’s won many Best Beer of Show awards and places in competitions.

He was a club president and has been on the club committee for all of its existence.

His contribution to the ideas and progress of the club is highly valued.

Another year is done — a year that wasn’t without Covid disruptions but we managed to work around it.
The club finally managed to host its premier event, BeerBQ, in its old format in June. All brewers bring whatever creation they want to share, food cooked and provided by the club and everyone digs in. The new venue at the ETKG Tennis Club was great and my only regret was I couldn’t be there (bloody Covid).

Our alternative events were also well attended and enjoyed — like our British cask beers night at the Hilton Hotel.
In an attempt to work around the restrictions on gatherings, we introduced the team’s brew-off. The first was the supermarket challenge that resulted in some interesting and very drinkable creations.

The second was Brew The Burra — a brewing challenge to replicate Lady Burra beers. Something closer to known styles than the supermarket beers.

While fun, the team events allowed newer members to connect with others often in their local area and in turn strengthened connections within the membership.

Again we successfully ran SABSOSA, won by our own Brendan Macey, and two club competitions.
Throughout the year members had some social catch-ups at local venues including Shapeshifter, Kickback and Brightstar.

All of this including regular monthly meetings couldn’t be organised by a single person and I thank the committee for all their work, even with life’s commitments, serious illness, Covid and weddings.

I won’t be standing again for president this time. I’ve enjoyed it a lot and I feel it’s time to let someone else have a go and new committee members to share their fresh ideas.

I’ll still be a part of the club of course.
Thank you.
Gus

It’s been a big few weeks in beer with our Winter competition and Beer n BBQ on the weekend. We hope you can join us for the regular monthly meeting at the Wheaty on Wednesday from 7pm.

Our AGM meeting special guest is a club founding member, president, brewer and owner of Left Barrel Brewing, Brad Bown. He is also now 2022 Champion Beer of Show brewer with his Bob’s Ya Dunkle judged at the SA Beer Awards last week. He always has a lot to say about brewing and going pro.

We’ll also hold our AGM and to begin the celebration of the club’s 10th anniversary, the club will put on some special treats for everyone attending.

The AGM agenda is here (but will probably be updated on the night), including nominations received so far, and the minutes of the 2021 AGM here. You can still nominate for a committee place now via email or on the night at the meeting. As we wrote before, joining the committee is rewarding, fun and helps steer the best brewing club in Australia in the right direction.

We’ll also be presenting the medals to the winners of the Winter Competition.

Greetings. It’s that time of SABC’s year for two things — the winter competition and its AGM.

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