Competitions and Amazing Advice

At Friday's club meeting Michael Fairbrother gave us an update on the preparations for the New England Regional Homebrew Competition and it sounds great. Lots of sponsors, a beautiful sounding location (The Shed, in Acton, Maine), swag lined up for judges and stewards, a few entries already registered, and the website is ready for you to enter your beer. You can also sign up to be a judge or a steward at the competition, which I highly recommend as it is a lot of fun, you get to taste a lot of excellent beer, and its the only way you will get one of the awesome swag bags the NERHBC committee is putting together.

I plan to enter a beer in the NERBC this fall, but before it can be entered it needs to be bottled. At Friday's meeting I was talking to Bill Rucker and I mentioned that I was going to buy some more bottles because I didn't want to deal with cleaning the really old messy, still labeled commercial bottles that seem to breed in our cellar. He told me that half a scoop of OxiClean in a 5 gallon bucket of warm water will take the labels off nearly all commercial bottles and will clean the icky stuff (my term, not his) out of the bottoms of old bottles. It worked great! I now have plenty of sparkly clean bottles ready to sanitize and fill and it took twenty-five cents worth of OxiClean. I cleaned a little over 2 cases of bottles and only 2 ended up in the recycle bin because the labels wouldn't come off. They were both Stark Mill Brewery bottles. (I said they were old!) If you bottle your homebrew you should try this. If you don't bottle your homebrew, you should be bringing me your empty bottles. Thanks Bill!