Venue: The Dove St. Inn, Ipswich

Attending: Guy Gallington, Dave Caeils, Rich Swindells, Tony Tilbury, Nik Leng, Kev Warnes, Colin Miller, Alan Osbiston, Tim Stanton, Graham Smith, Steve Plampton, Phil Turner, Steve Bennett, Pete Burgess, David Spencer, Evie Spencer, Kevin Martin

Apologies: Jim Pettifor, Nick Davis, Justin Dean

Tim and I arrived at The Dove just before 12, the Essex contingent were already present with their noses pressed against the windows of the Dove awaiting the doors to open.

We purchased our pre-meeting pints, ordered our lunches and opened the meeting with apologies and a request of patience with the greenhorn chairperson.  A quick reminder of the ACB competition was also issued, imploring anyone that has not entered to do so, wanting a strong representation for the club’s home competition.

Nik L kindly offered to steward for us. With the focus of the challenge being on picking out hop descriptors there was no reason to judge the beers blind and the brewer was announced at the time of tasting.

With such a large turnout and high quantity of hop tester beers to get through we got stuck straight into the 10 CF386 brews. The beers that were presented were:

We stopped for lunch to refuel and soak up some of the alcohol. 

After lunch we went straight into the 5 CF384 beers.  The beers that were presented were:

As usual the standard of brewing was very high, with all the beers in excellent condition.

A brief discussion about the hops was held following the tastings.  The overwhelming opinion ‘despite offering some characteristics different to current uk hops on the market’, is that they were both rather underwhelming and very unlikely to be commercially viable. Unfortunately, it was quite a challenge to brew a flavourful beer with the hops provided.  Although CF386 did provide some interesting orange notes in Graham’s bitter that complimented it well. It also provided a cream soda/ice cream flavour when used in biotransformation dry hopping.

We gathered everyone’s top 4 beers from CF386 and top 2 from CF384… Kev W and I totted up the votes, it was decided a BoS was not required and to send the beers by Pete B, Rich S, Phil T and Graham S to represent CF386.  Guy G and Tim S were selected to represent CF384.

Tim S then provided us with a talk on Hot side low oxygen brewing, which gave some interesting insights and new information that I’m sure many of us were not aware of. Tim’s talk notes are available here.

Following the talk I raised that I am looking to launch a club instagram page that was discussed at last years AGM and made a plea for people to provide pictures and short videos to build a bank of content to launch the channel e.g. brew day footage, end of day hydrometer readings, pouring homebrews, new toys etc. This may have slightly fallen on deaf ears with everyone becoming progressively inebriated.

With the time pushing on we finished up with AOB, of which (fortunately) there were only 3. I did forget to take notes on these (oops!) we just drank and enjoyed them all and didn’t go into detail on recipes etc.

After a quick tidy up the meeting concluded, a contingent of us made our now usual pilgrimage to the Spread Eagle for a few post meeting pints of Grain’s ThreeOneSix to finish off the evening.

A big thank you to everyone that made the effort to brew,  attend and present their beers. I am hopeful the effort we all put into this challenge, with the information and brews we provide to Charles Faram, will show we are a skilled brewers and start to grow a relationship between us in the hope of receiving more promising experimental hops in the future (there are certainly some more exciting new UK hops from CF on the horizon!).