2025 AGM Meeting Minutes
Anglian Craft Brewers Annual General Meeting 2025 Minutes
Date: 4th October 2025
Venue: Victoria Inn, Colchester
Attendees: Nick Davis, Justin Dean, Nik Leng, Jim Pettifor, Steve Plampton, Rich Swindells, Tony Tilbury, Kev Warnes.
Apologies: Colin Miller, Alan Osbiston, Graham Smith, Andy Whitaker,
1: Chairperson
Nick Davis was proclaimed as Chairperson with no rumbles of dissent. Rich Swindells continues with the Vice Chairperson title.
2: In Memoriam
Glasses were raised as we toasted the memory of long term ACB member Gerard Galvin who passed away recently and Alan Wareham, a prominent member of the local CAMRA community and supporter of the homebrew community.
3: Thanks
Rich Swindells thanked Jim for his service in the role of Chairperson over the last two years.
Jim wanted to thank the various organisers of our various 2025 events that we enjoyed, specifically calling out Colin for his work organizing the Harvey’s brewery visit and his work with Charles Faram in sourcing the hops for our hop challenge; Guy for work generating the spiral charts that we used as feedback to CF for the hop challenge; Alan for his arrangement of the Sensory day.
4: Regional Organisers
The current system of organization at local level was felt to be working well and no changes to the current structure were believed to be necessary. To wit, Jim and Nick will continue to manage the Ipswich/Suffolk local events and Justin, Tony and Rich will manage the Colchester/Essex regions.
5: 2026 Events
The Shed Brewers festival is scheduled to be held on 16th May 2026. Formal announcements, requests for brewers, ticket sales will all be publicized closer to the event.
We will examine the possibility of two potential brewery tours next year. The proposals for further investigation are Batemans and The Colchester Brewery.
Colin Miller (absent) has offered to organize the Batemans visit. We will need to investigate what Batemans beers are available to us locally (or via mail order) that we can taste, with a possibility of choosing one as a beer to clone and be judged by Batemans. I notice on the Batemans website today that their beer descriptions have reasonable detail describing the malts and hops used in each beer.
Tom at Colchester Brewery has offered us the recipe for No.1, for us to brew.
Further details will follow when the events are formally organized.
6: 2026 Calendar and Monthly Meetings
Nick proposed a new meeting schedule, splitting the year up into thirds and having a month in each third where no Saturday meeting was scheduled…this would allow us some flexibility when organising events such as brewery tours or other visits and allow us to move scheduled meetings, so they wouldn’t need to be cancelled to allow another event to take place. Each region (Suffolk, Essex North, and Essex South) would still have one meeting in each calendar third.
It was also agreed that, to give a bit more cohesion to the challenges, rather than have challenge beers tasted across three separate meetings, each challenge would have a fixed meeting at the end of each third, where beers would be tasted. There is of course no reason why you cannot bring your challenge beer to an earlier meeting or send bottles of your beer to the prescribed tasting session, if you are unable to attend.
| Month | Host Region | Challenge Tasting |
| January | ||
| February | Essex South | |
| March | Suffolk | |
| April | Essex North | Abbot Ale Clone |
| May | ||
| June | Suffolk | |
| July | Essex North | |
| August | Essex South | South Pacific Flavours |
| September | ||
| October | Essex North | |
| November | Essex South | |
| December | Suffolk | Belgian Beers |
7: 2026 Beer Challenges
The sharp eyed amongst you will have spotted the three beer challenges in the meeting schedule above.
The first challenge is to brew a clone beer of Abbot Ale. This challenge is in honour of recently passed Gerard Galvin. Amongst the club resources we have a very well sourced recipe for Abbot Ale which will be linked to, when the event is published on the club website
The second challenge is to brew a beer with what we are calling “South Pacific Flavours.” This is an open style challenge, brew any style of beer that you want but it should have hints of the “South Pacific”…this can be achieved by use of Australian or New Zealand hop varieties or perhaps by the addition of tropical fruits such as Pineapple, Kiwi, Mango, Coconut etc. The world is your oyster in this challenge. I guess if you re-imagined Lilt as beer then you are halfway there (probably too far if I am honest…but I’m sure you get the drift!).
The third challenge will be to simply brew a Belgian beer. You are free to choose any Belgian style you want.
The three challenges therefore deliver a direct clone challenge, a general style independent challenge but with prescribed flavour targets and finally, a regional style challenge.
Only having three challenges (to fit in with the splitting up of the year into thirds) also has less impact on brewer’s schedules, which hopefully might increase the number of brewers who participate in the challenges.
8: Communications
As a club we still suffer from having several different communication platforms, some of which are more accessible than others, depending on who you are and your engagement with “technology.”
It was agreed that we will focus more on using e-mail as the primary method of communication when publicizing events for the first time. Events would still be listed on the ACB website, but the initial notification would be via email, with the email containing options for the recipients to join or subscribe to an event by way of a simple button click.
It was also acknowledged that a feature where an email is generated when an event is publicized on the website, would be especially useful. The system is believed to be capable, but e-mails may not be triggered due to the way events are currently created. Tony is going to investigate and resolve.
Kev also suggested that it may be useful to dedicate time at one of our monthly meetings where we focus on communications and understanding a bit more about “content generation” which may drive greater engagement across the club. Such content could be as simple as taking a few pictures of your brewday and posting them on the Slack site or writing a blog post for the website direct about a particular brewing subject that you may have expertise in or a specific interest.
9: 2025 Homebrew Competition
Nick reported that we currently have 118 entries for our competition (max 120). This number will no doubt reduce around the time of the payment deadline and there are always a few beers that simply do not make it through the post. It is likely that the final number of beers received will be closer to 100.
Nick raised concerns about the number of judges that had registered and that at this time there is certainly a need for additional judging sessions. Some of the tables are looking quite “tough” in terms of the number and “size” of the beers.
Nick will try to encourage judges attending the NAB homebrew competition next weekend to come and join us and Jim will also engage some of the people who are currently undergoing the BJCP training that the club is running.
Competition date is Saturday 22nd November, in one of Isaac’s on the Quay upper floor conference rooms.
10: Finances
On behalf of the club, Nick holds £336.17 in a PayPal account. These funds have been generated purely from “profits” of the homebrew competitions that have been held in previous years.
Once all the 2025 Competition entries and expenses have been processed, it is expected that this amount will rise to around £440.
The money is available to pay website hosting fees, support the judge training sessions, provide support for tours/visits where needed or other club activities.
11: AOB
It was discussed whether it would be possible to find a supplier of logo’d t-shirts (or other apparel) which we could provide a link to for members to purchase. Nick is aware of a t-shirt supplier around the corner from him who offers logo printed shirts and will have a chat with them about possible costs and supply methods.
Also, please be reminded of the forthcoming visit and clone beer challenge to Chelmsford Brewery on 25th October (thanks to Justin for organising)…please sign up for this in the “events” section of the website.
12: Meeting Closed
Thanks to everyone for their input and for conducting themselves in a manner that allowed the meeting to flow freely and efficiently, resulting in the meeting closing at a ridiculously early 2.30pm. This allowed us to boost the Victoria Inn’s turnover, with various raids on the bar and more interestingly, on the specialist rare beer fridge.
