January Meeting: Brewing Water Chemistry

Monday January 13th at 7:00 PM
Muddy York Brewing Co.
22 Cranfield Road, Toronto, Ontario, M4B 3H1  MAP

This month we have five exciting meeting elements!

  • Presentation: Brewing Water Chemistry by Eric Cousineau
  • Special Guest: Q&A with Lizanne Pharand (P.Eng.) from Toronto Water
  • Style of the Month: Bock
    • Presented by: Emily Storey
  • Homebrew Bottle Swap
  • Structured Tasting *New Format*

We are going back to our gracious host, Muddy York Brewing Co! We request that everyone spend some money to support our wonderful host. Don’t forget to buy some bottles from their shop!

First time? Read our Monthly Meeting overview!

Bringing Beer to Share: There are usually 40+ people at each meeting so we recommend bringing at least 1L of your beer if you want everyone to try it. If you want detailed feedback on your beer, consider arriving by 7 PM to ensure you get a spot in the Structured Tasting. Don’t forget your recipe notes!

Don’t forget to bring your tasting glass!

Meeting Schedule

  • Special Guest: 7:00 – 7:30 PM – Q&A with Lizanne Pharand (P.Eng.) from Toronto Water
    • Bring your questions about Toronto Water!
  • Announcements: ~8:00 PM – Club President welcomes everyone to the meeting and makes announcements about upcoming events and activities
  • Style of the Month: (8:10-8:15) – Bock
    • Emily Storey highlights BJCP styles
  • Presentation: 8:15-9:00 PM – Brewing Water Chemistry by Eric Cousineau
  • In Parallel:
    • Mingle: 9:00-10:00 PM – Stick around to socialize and share more homebrew
    • Structured Tasting: 9:00-9:30 PM – Group of veteran judges/brewers gather to give detailed feedback on member homebrew while everyone else in the room tastes along.
      • No Sign Up Required, first-come first-served.
  • Clean Up: 10:00 PM – All the fun comes at a price. Please stick around for a few minutes and help us straighten up! Your help is greatly appreciated.

Style of the Month: Bock

Every other month, Emily Storey shares a short presentation to highlight the beer style(s) of the month. This month she is featuring the infamous Bock category from Brew Slam. This category contains: Helles Bock, Dunkels Bock, Dopplebock, and Eisbock. It’s been said “Stay Outta Bocks” – Clayton 2019, but after this presentation we’ll all be brewing them!

Bi-Monthly Homebrew Bottle Swap

Every other month we run a bottle swap! Just bring 6 bottles of your homebrew, and drop them off with Emily at the sign in desk. At the end of the meeting you’ll have 6 assorted bottles of homebrew to bring home! No sign-up necessary!

Presentation: Brewing Water Chemistry

As is tradition, January’s meeting theme is Brewing Water Chemistry! This month will mark the 5th iteration of Eric’s famous “Intro to Brewing Water” presentation. We will start with the basics like pH and minerals, and their effect on your brewing. Then we will deep dive into some practical tips and tricks to make you comfortable thinking about, and adjusting, brewing water as part of your brewing process.

This presentation we will be preceded by a Q&A session with Lizanne Pharand (P.Eng.) from Toronto Water. Her department has been very generous to our club over the years, and supports us with publishing our Latest Toronto Water Results (Unofficial).

If you’ve never seen this presentation before, you don’t want to miss it! If you’ve seen past versions of it, there will be new refinements, and also gives you a great opportunity to refresh.

New Structured Tasting Format

Recent feedback from several club members has indicated that our current Structured Tasting format (introduced in Sept 2018) has reduced the amount of social time in the meetings by too much. After some discussion among club officers we decided to tweak the format again.

We will maintain the element of veteran tasters sharing their perceptions, however we will move Structured Tasting off the microphone. Instead the session will be conducted over to one side of the room so that people can choose if they wish to listen along or not.

Note: We plan to maintain the 7 PM start time in the future, but we have moved it to 9 PM for this month only due to schedule considerations for this meeting.

Membership & Guest Attendance

Due to AGCO requirements for serving home-brewed beer under SOP (Special Occasion Permit), club membership is required to attend monthly meetings. However, prospective members are invited to attend their first meeting as a guest to check us out before committing to membership.

Attend once and you’ll want to keep coming back, we promise!

Click here to get on the guest list for free.