Thank you, Fred. I will say that our team has exceeded my initial expectations, but I am disappointed that I have not been able to recruit more homebrewers. Lately, though, I have been preoccupied with things other than recruitment, so I'll need to get back to that as soon as possible. My other 'Homebrewing' project, so to speak, has grown more -- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BrewingEquipment -- which I formed on October 21, 2005 -- exactly one month before forming our WCG HomeBrewers team -- and it now has over 500 members. For any actual 'homebrewers' here, you really need to check out that group; it has some real innovative ideas and excellent brewers, many of whom are professionals.

Anyway, I see that we made it to #72 as predicted. Thank you to everyone; please keep up the good work.

Cheers.

Bill Velek

Hi Brink. Good to hear from you. We were getting real spoiled down here in Arkansas; the weather had been well above average for most of the winter, but the cold finally hit us. It snowed just enough on Wednesday for schools to be closed on Thursday; a few were closed yesterday, too. I brewed an IPA last night, and it was a bit colder outside than it usually is when I brew, but I managed okay. I have the IPA doing its primary in covered buckets right now, because I want to use my empty carboy for a rotation in the next day or two, i.e., rack my ESB from primary into the clean carboy, clean a carboy, rack my RIS from primary into the former ESB carboy, clean a carboy, and then rack (or pour, if I do it today) my IPA from buckets into the former RIS carboy. For nonbrewers who visit, here is what that means: my carboys are those 5-gallon glass water bottles that are used in water coolers instead of water fountains; racking is carefully siphoning beer from one container to another so that sediment in the bottom is left behind; the ESB and RIS were brewed last weekend, and are pretty much finished their 'primary' fermentation, so I want to move them into clean carboys ('secondaries') to get them off of the sediment to improve them a bit before bottling; the IPA that I just brewed can go through primary in the buckets, but I prefer to use my glass carboys; the acronyms stand for the following different beer styles:
ESB = Extra Strong Bitter
IPA = India Pale Ale
RIS = Russian Imperial Stout

Brewing is a fantastic hobby, ... especially if you like beer other than commercial stuff like Budweiser, Miller, Coors, etc.

Regarding our team, I'm pretty sure that we will move up to #71 tomorrow night. GO TEAM!!!

Cheers.

We are trying to catch your team JC.

-Brink

We've recaptured #71 tonight, and should make it to #70 tomorrow night and we'll be right on the heels of Team Andrax again.

Cheers.

Bill Velek

Yesterday I posted a message on the Usenet newsgroup rec.crafts.brewing announcing that our HomeBrewers team has now moved into the top HALF percent of all teams on the WCG. I also briefly explained what we do and invited others to join us.

I think it would be very helpful for recruitment if all of our team members who actually brew beer ... and anyone else who would care to do so ... would post a comment or two to that thread to keep it active for a few days and to endorse the program and how safe and reliable it is. Hopefully our brewers have posted there before and are somewhat known by others, but if not, you might start out by introducing yourself and sharing how long you've been brewing beer, and that sort of thing, so that our thread isn't perceived as just a bunch of spammers who have gotten together. Your help with this will be greatly appreciated.

To easily find the thread, you can either sort by sender -- Bill Velek -- or by subject -- 'HomeBrewers' now in the top half percent of all teams on WCG

If anyone is not familiar with Usenet, you are missing out on an important and useful facet of the Internet. Let me know and I'll explain, or you can check out this Wiki -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

Thanks.