The Big 200!

It’s with great pride that I can make this announcement. We have just had a new member sign up to the NHC. This member is no ordinary member — Patrick Long from Limerick was the 200th member to sign up. Yes, we have hit 200 full members!

So here we stand, going into Christmas, with a huge member base, that is increasing all the time. On the way to this magic number we have passed many milestones: we manned a great stand at the Alltech Brewing & Distilling Conference; we had a stand and demo at the Maker Faire in Trinity College. We witnessed the winner of our national competition, Ormeau Dark being served at the RDS, and we manned a stand there as well, with a live demo and samples at hand. We ran the first homebrew festival in the Bernard Shaw where fifteen different homebrew beers were served to the public. Needless to say that was a huge success. We have seen the Demo Days in Belfast, Galway, Wicklow and Cork. People have also have run several homebrew talks in pubs. The summer beer competition was a huge success and the winners, Cathal and Emma, got the opportunity to brew recently at the BRÚ Brewery. The education side is progressing nicely with nineteen members meeting up for the Beer Judge Certification Program, which will be great for the club in the long term as we will have lots of Certified Judges for our competitions.

However, our biggest success, over this period has to be the huge growth at a local level. Most clubs meet up once a month, they organise local competitions and many are participating in collaboration brews involving barrel ageing. They get together for group buys, and lots of hops, grains and yeasts get exchanged at the meet-ups. Some clubs now have yeast banks: thanks to all the work by the scientists showing us yeast slanting techniques. Many of the local clubs are organising Christmas bashes, so if you’re not in a local club, or you haven’t been to a meet-up you can contact me on the forum and I’ll get you sorted with your local rep.

So congrats to Patrick our 200th member — I have a growler and some glasses for you. Roll on 300!

James Keane
AKA – Partridge9
President / Membership Coordinator.