We had a great turnout this month, it was good to see a lot of familiar faces and a few new ones (including Mickey…or Mikey???). The Mosaic challenge went great, lots of fantastic entries, and we have a lot of upcoming activities to look forward to outside of our regular monthly meetings. Special thanks to Roger for all his help with the comp, I can’t imagine how unorganized this would have been without his help.

I also really enjoy having the meetings at Vasona/Oak Meadow, I hope to do this again next year May to August. There’s no September meeting due to NCHF and some other club activities, so we’ll resume it October.

• Silicon Valley Beer Week Recap – a bit lackluster overall. Some people attended one or two fun events and some new venues are getting involved but not close to competing with SF Beer Week
• Upcoming comps
  • Santa Cruz County Fair was due 8/15, we had a couple entires
  • ET Barnette packages shipping this week, and they sound pretty exciting
  • Sacramento Homebrew Comp – accepting entries at NCHF
  • State Comp coming soon, expect separate e-mail for details
• NCHF 2015 – if you’re going you should have seen the e-mails, we won’t bother the entire distribution, can’t wait!
• Next club comp
  • The next comp will be coffee beer, with everything going on we decided to push this out until our January meeting. We don’t want anyone rushing anything. There will probably be several reminders but we are thinking the only criteria is best coffee beer, no other restrictions.
• Barrel beer status
  • We’re targeting 10/10 to fill the barrel. If you signed up to participate please have a fully fermented stout ready by then, remember we’re going with a bung, no airlock.
• Field trip – Grillin & Chillin, we’re going to get a car or two full of people down to Hollister soon to go see Jonathan in action, date TBD but sometime soon, we’ll send a separate message once we pick a date
• Mosaic single hop comp
  • We had 12 entries overall, 4 IPAs, 4 Saisons, a pale ale, an amber ale, and 2 smoked beers wheat beers. The entires were awesome, all very different and did a great job of showcasing the diversity of Mosaic
  • Results:
    • 1st Jonathan’s Pale Ale, the first beer we tasted but definitely flawless. Personally I was reluctant to give it a higher score knowing it was the first and we had a lot more coming, but it was well deserving of 1stplace
    • 2nd Kyle’s Brett Saison, I might be a bit biased on this one, but I am very happy with how this turned out. Even though it’s young for a brett beer it shows a good balance of hop flavor, classic saison, and brett characteristics, pretty much what I was shooting for
    • 3rd Rich’s Imperial IPA, a very well done IPA, clear and well balanced, personally reminded me of some of recent Stone IPAs in a good way
• Beers
  • Homebrew:
    • Eric’s Black IPA – think Stone Sublimely Self Righteous
    • Roger’s mead with cocopandan syrup (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocopandan_syrup)
    • Roger’s dry mead, with wine yeast, Epernay 2
    • Kyle’s Belgian Pale dry hopped with azacca
    • Kyle’s Farmhouse sour
  • Commercial beers:
    • Ninkasi Ground Control
    • Surly Pentagram
    • Rare Barrel Shadow of Their Eyes