The October (or in German, Oktober) homebrew meetup was a BBQ to celebrate the great German festival of Oktoberfest. The festival usually involves 20,000 sweaty people in a tent getting blind drunk on Maerzen beers, which is basically a more malty darker larger. So our theme this month was for everybody to try and recreate this style. To celebrate Oktoberfest we decided to have a BBQ. We managed to work with Meng Chao at Brewer’s Craft (it’s one of the few bottle shops in Singapore that serves good craft beer) to set up at the communal pit outside his shop and so we went shopping and bought a lot of meet from The Butcher at Holland Village.
With the BBQ all fired up, we went through on a whole zoo of animals. We kept the gathering well lubricated with three kegs and some bottled beers by our members. I brought down a keg of Oktoberfest, John contributed a keg of koelsch, and Craig bought another keg of Oktoberfest. We had four beers enter this month’s judging session – two of these beers were not officially Oktoberfest beers, just German styles but we let them enter as we wanted to offer our members more choice. I guess no one really made the effort to make a German beer, as lagers are difficult to make and it’s just a boring style.
It was difficult to have a proper tasting, as people were spread around mingling, but we managed it. John koelsch’s ended up being voted the best beer and Craig Oktoberfest came in a close second. My beer did not fare very well – it came in last – and I think this is because it finished very sweet. I guess I used too much crystal malt.
After the tasting we carried on eating and drinking for another few hours. I think we managed a whole four solid hours of eating and drinking. The highlight of the event ended up being Hong Yee’s free-flow chicken that had marinated in beer on a whim. It made really juicy and tender chicken. Vivon and Eric’s pasta salad and German cake was also delicious. We ended up with 20 brewers there which was great we also had a few new brewers joining so hopefully we will see them again. We wrapped up the event around 11pm when the last merry brewers decided to leave.
The good news at the end of the night is that we came back with half a keg, so Markus is very happy.
