Great to see you making this happen Lloydie. For me, this is a great excuse to meet up, learn and have fun without the hassle of doing a full on brew day.
Here's a few thoughts on a way I think that it could be run...
Firstly, I would mainly have the focus on home brews rather than commercials, especially imports. As brewers, we are mainly interested in getting feedback on our own beers. Also, in my experience, home brews are way better than what ends up on our shelves here.
Secondly, I would not specify a particular style for each meeting. Most brewers have a few favourite styles and may even dislike a broad range of other styles. I certainly wouldn't turn up to any saison or sour beer sessions!!!
Thirdly, it is pretty much impossible to taste a beer accurately when tasting them consecutiveley especially if you get a dud to start with. So, beers need to be tasted together and alone to get the most accurate feedback.
Bearing in mind the above three things, how about this for a draft format based on 8 attendees?...
(For the inaugural meeting, all participants need to choose a readily available commercial beer. All participants will have to buy one bottle of this beer and the suggestee will need to buy an extra 3 'control' bottles to bring along to the first meet. All else below follows from this.)
1. Meet once a month at someone's house. Rotate this. Host provides crackers.
2. Each attendee brings one bottle of beer for each attendee to take home from the meeting and retains 3 bottles for the next meeting.
3. Prior to each meeting, attendees will have tasted 8 bottles of beer and made notes on the beer in any format they like. They should bring 8 copies of their notes to the meeting so as others can take these notes on each beer home. These should then be distributed.
4. The 8 beers can now be reviewed using the 3 "control" bottles. Of course, an appropriate order of tasting should be decided upon.
The end result of all this is attendees get to taste 8 beers alone and in their own time prior to each meeting. They then get 7 other people's notes on those 8 beers and also get to re-taste them in the group environment.
The main pleasure of all this, apart from the educational side, is that all attendees will have at least one beer they are interested in whilst still enjoying the general talk about brewing that will naturally result.
Where the commercials/imports come in is when a brewer does not have 11 bottles (8+3) of their own beer to bring along. In that case, they should buy 11 bottles of their favourite beer. The inaugural meeting will require all of us to do this.
Was that any help? Make sense?
