Indiana Beer Club - Read This First

Welcome to the Indiana Beer Club!

Whether by personal invitation or from reading about us in the Indiana Gazette article, you have found our club blog - the place to get news and share thoughts about beer and the beer scene in western Pennsylvania.

The club was started in January 2007 by Jon, Lacey, Eli, and Nate. All of us have a passion for good beer, and we hope you do, too. The purpose of the club is to gather monthly as a social outlet (clubs should be fun, no?) but with a focus on craft beer in our homes and our communities. We are not a drinking club, per se, although we do enjoy drinking beer at the meetings - but rather, we hope to share our passion and collective knowledge about beer with those who are interested in learning more about this ubiquitous drink. If you are simply interested in drinking copious amounts of pale, fizzy lagers or finding a new place to get sloppy, then our club will most likely not meet your expectations.

Each meeting will strive to have a theme. As our group grows, we will probably have to switch from meeting in members' homes to meeting at local pubs. Starting out, each member brought a beer or two to share with everyone that he/she hoped hadn't been tried before in a particular style: Belgian ales, stouts, or IPAs, for example. As we expand, we'll most likely try to keep this type of theme, or sample several beers from a particular brewer. Depending upon the meeting place, we may or may not be able to bring our own beer - but rather coordinate with the publican to supply us with specific products.

Some members simply wish to try something new, whether a style or brand, and leave it at that. Some members keeps detailed notes on the beers they drink, in order to improve their knowledge and make recommendations to others. Whatever your preference, we can assist!

We encourage homebrewers to join our club. Several members have brewed or wish to learn, and it's usually more fun to have some help and conversation when brewing up a batch! We also like to share our homebrews with other members, and they really enjoy it.

When interest is high, we will try to facilitate organized trips to local beer festivals, such as the State College Microbrewers Festival and the Penn Brewery Festival. Our blog calendar will list several beer-related events in the region, and we hope that people will take advantage of them.

The rest? Well, for the time being there are no dues. When meeting, you'll be expected to BYOB - enough to share a small taste with everyone. Unless it's the theme for the evening, we discourage malt liquors and the macrobrewed lagers such as Bud, Miller, Coors, Yuengling, Molson, Labatt (well, you get the point) and their associated lite/light versions. If we meet at a pub, you're expected to pay your own way - for organized tastings, we'll try to get a list of attendees and figure out the lowest 'fee' for the meeting so that everyone gets their fair share.

Feel free to leave comments in the blog posts or to contact us at indianabeerclub@gmail.com.

We look forward to meeting you and sharing good beer and good conversation. Cheers!