Monthly meetings/tastings
MALT usually schedules a meeting and tasting each month at a club member’s home. Equipment demos, 50/50 tickets, snacks and finger foods, sodas and a ride home or offer to stay the night, if required, are offered at all club tastings/meetings. In addition, there is plenty of information sharing. All participants are asked to bring some home-brew or a microbrew and these events are open to the public.
Big Brew Day at Maryland Homebrew
Malt participates with other clubs that form the Free State Homebrew Guild in an annual event where brewers from all over the state of Maryland come together and brew out back of the Maryland Homebrew store in Columbia, MD. This event is part of the larger AHA celebration of National Homebrew Day.
Baysox Baseball
We used to all attend a Bowie Baysox game as a club. We haven’t done this for a while. But if any of the club members are interested, we could restart the tradition.
Crab Feast
Each September MALT is part of a Crab Feast, Up until the last couple of years it was at someone’s house. But we have merged our crab feast with the FHG crab feast at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD lately, So it ends up being a bigger party.
Xmas Party
This event includes the December tasting which is a free-for-all what beer do you like hedonistic judging. This is a just for fun, and decidedly not a regular BJCP style judging event. The party is at a member’s house. All participants are requested to bring a dish and the club provides a Micro keg.
We have a fun gift exchange that used to have a big variety of gifts, but have lately degenerated into a lot of those beer sampler gifts with or without the fancy glass in the package. Not that that is a bad thing. But who knows what next Christmas will bring. We do the exchange where we can steal a gift from someone that has already got a gift, or go to the stash of unopened gifts.
The event is well attended and is a great beginning to the holidays.
Bus tours/pub crawls
Once a year, our members will organize a bus trip somewhere to breweries, brewpubs or beer bars in the region. The bus trips are usually a nice event when the winter really starts getting long–right around or on Presidents Day weekend. We usually have a tour of a brewing operation or two, we often are able to con the brewery out of some free stuff. We have plenty of beer on the bus, and encourage members to have someone pick them up when they get off the bus or stay at the hotel from which the bus departs. We arrange discounts at the hotel. Valuable information can be gleaned at these events from our fellow brewers and selected brewmasters–but mostly it is an all day party.