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These minutes are extremely tardy, I know. I have somehow lost track of my secretarial duties…but I’m baaaaack!

Present: Joan, Lisa, Denise, Mariana and Heidi. Jan’s mom called to excuse her Absence (tee hee)

This meeting was a "cheer" meeting, i.e., we met conjointly with the Chess club. The purpose was to brew beer again.

The Chess club made Meade, finished before we began. We had shopped earlier in the week for the ingredients for our two varieties, "Tits up in the mud Pale Ale" and "Hazelnut Brown Ale" (the latter we’ve made before). The first beer went fairly quickly except that the wort cooled too fast and too cold (ala the brewmaster mike) so we were unable to pitch the yeast. Lisa confirmed that the temp was up by the next afternoon. The alcohol reading was rather high, we’ll see what happens. The secondary hops will be added later, as the beer is moved into the carboy. In between boilings we had a chance to check out Rick’s finished masonry sculpture. Lisa and Rick have put it into a garden setting and it was STUNNING! We also got a tour of the shop and what’s new in there – when can we come and buy?

Since we had a lot going on, some of the husbands joined us as well as the chess club wives. We had a surplus of good food and drank every drop of beer available. The highlights were Debbie’s soup and Kathy’s dessert. The beer was really good as well, I just can’t recall the varieties!

Joan was in top form (as was her brother) that night. Tim was not with us for the initial viewing of the sculpture so went to see it later on. When he returned to the kitchen he said the sculpture had a "tits up in the mud" look about it. You’ll have to check it out for yourself to see if you agree. We’ll All get a Second look when we sip our finished "tits up in the mud Pale Ale". Since our "Tits" wort was in a near frozen form, we were wanting to try a different way to cool the wort, other than dumping ice in it. Our idea was to cool the wort by placing the container in an "ice water bath". We would add salt to the ice water much like when making ice cream. As we neared the point in time for cooling the wort we hoped we could get it going on our own, via our novel idea, but just then…"the iceman cometh". We could barely get it together enough to go on, we were laughing so hard at joan’s comment. We did succeed in our plan and the wort cooled to pitching temp in about 15 minutes. We finally were finished around 1:30am. So ended an eventful and hilarious meeting of beer club with successful brewing of beer. Can’t wait to do it again!