Midnight Homebrewers' League

Steve Kranz

5/4/2009 1:01:23 PM #

I am one of the founding members of the Midnight Homebrewers' League...currently serving as club Secretary which also encompasses the role of Web Slave.  Though I'm not much for reading blogs (beer or otherwise), one of our members recently came across your mention of us so I thought I would follow up.

First, thanks for the plug, and we're glad you (re-)discovered us by reading our little piece in BYO last year.  However, we've been around very publicly since 1994...been an AHA registered club since the very beginning.  We have participated in Big Brew and registered our site with the AHA since its inception.  This year we had 28 (out of about 65) members post for Big Brew.

In addition to Big Brew, we host an annual public Brew-Ha-Ha in July, and both events have been the subject of numerous write-ups in the Carroll County Times and other local papers over the years.  We have been an integral part of the Maryland Microbrewery Festival in Union Mills since its inception three...no, four years ago, and last year conducted that festival's first homebrew competition, the winner of which (a fellow from down in Kensington, MD) had his recipe brewed by Dog Brewing Company and sold commercially at Buffalo Wild Wings' three Maryland locations.  Same again for this year...the two style categories for this year's competition are Belgian Dubbel and Scottish Export 80/-.

Our club was never big on regular "meetings" though earlier this year we began to have quarterly membership meetings in addition to other scheduled tasting and brewing events.  The first meeting was at Dog Brewing Co. in Westminster (the former home of Clay Pipe Brewing Co. off of Rt. 31 if you know where that is...roughly across from the Westminster Livestock Auction).  We're hoping to make it our regular meeting site...George recently installed a new tasting room which is very sweet...parking right out front...perfect.

Anyway, to see what we're up to, our web site features a public event schedule powered by Google Calendar.

Yes, we also do have a Yahoo! Group.  However, it is only open to members of our club...and it is not really active, since only a handful of our members ever signed up for it.  We do also have a Facebook Group, but similarly, only a handful of our members are also Facebook members.

We have also had a significant presence as a Club Night participant at each of the last several National Homebring Conferences (Baltimore, Orlando, Denver, Cincinnati, and again next month in Oakland...wahoo!!).  Because of the distance and expense, only eight people (5 club members) are making the Oakland trip, but we're shipping our beer (probably 4 kegs) to serve at Club Night and looking foward to stacking our beers up against all the other clubs again this year.

About 11 of our members & friends went to see Beer Wars Live!.  The prevailing response was that it was so-so...good message, but not promoted nearly well enough (as evidenced by the 30 or so people in the whole theater); not enough breweries were featured, and there was way too much focus on the Moon Shot lady who isn't even a brewer.

Lastly for now, we are also a charter member of the Free State Homebrew Guild, an "umbrella" group for lack of a better description, of ten Maryland homebrew clubs.  If you are still looking for a club to join, perhaps you will find something there that interests you: http://www.mdhomebrewers.org/

Feel free to contact us and peruse our web site, which is all available and open to the public at:
http://home.comcast.net/~midnighthomebrewers/