[Makerspace-keymembers] Possible future SCA-and-Makerspace brew days, and a quick breakdown of this one?

[Dena Strong]

Hi all! I'm not 100% sure whether having both a mailing list and individual
folks on an email thread will keep the individual folks once replies
happen, but I thought it would be worth a try? (If anyone SCA-side knows
Terra's email address, she'd probably be a good person to talk with too.)

Part 1:
Emily and I had a really nice chat-slash-debriefing over tea tonight after
work and she said that the Makerspace crew is also excited by how many
folks are interested in brewing and that the Makerspace can contribute more
hands and more equipment (ranging from brew-type to things like the Square
card reader for credit card taking) to future joint endeavors. She
suggested starting a joint email thread to discuss the possibility of more
like this.

Since it seems like there's definitely untapped interest out there, what do
folks in both groups think about the possibility of some future brew
workshops?

If so, do any particular dates look appealing to folks?

Part 2, the recap and review:

What went well this time:
Using the St John basement and kitchen for brewing or cooking workshops is
*fantastic.* There was plenty of room to have the sanitizing and bottling
and capping stations out in the main room and reserving the kitchen for
things that need the six burners.

Logistically (water, heat, and seating-wise), it was a ton easier to do a
brew day in the church basement and kitchen than it had been when Ro and I
did it in the Makerspace itself. And the reservation fee was only $50,
which we could math in to the workshop fees.

Bringing a portable projector and projecting the slides on the wall worked
well too - since it's in the basement, dimming a bank of lights was enough
to let the projector be visible on the wall.

It was also really helpful having Stephanie teaching coffee and Rick
teaching sake at the same time -- not everyone can be hands-on at the same
time when you're bottling and capping, so having them both taking part of
the group while other people were individually cycling through the
sterilize-rinse-bottle-cap-label dance helped keep more of the crowd
occupied.

Pre-loading the stuff into the storage under the church stairwell on Friday
was really key to being able to set up and get going on time. (Thanks again
for the tour and the storage key, Liz!)

Having people sign up in advance for the hands-on slots and pay online in
advance gave me both a built-in way to cap the attendance and a guaranteed
pool of cash to buy the ingredients from. We could control the hands-on
numbers that way (though in hindsight I shouldn't have added the extra 5
gallons to let more people in; I should've just said 'sorry, next time').

What didn't go so well:

Friday's hauling-in took me about 4 hours, so next time let's put out a
call for more stuff-hauling crew during prep day.

It takes a long time to bottle ten gallons of beer, even if there are a ton
of people interested in doing it; next time, I'd say we should cap a
hands-on beer segment at the number of people who can get 6-packs out of
one five gallon batch (I think about 8?)

Math fail: I wasn't aiming for anything resembling a profit, I was trying
to make the workshop cost match the materials cost. But I'd miscalculated
how expensive the honey would be in bulk from Amazon, so I didn't break
even. I now know the cost of honey better; I'm chalking that up to learning
curve.

Also, Emily says it's OK to calculate a profit in for future workshop cost
math, and we could split a profit between the groups.

Emily's recommendation of one teacher per ten students sounds like a good
ratio to me. We had about one per twelve to fifteen this time, I think?

(I'm not entirely sure if everyone signed in on the sign-in sheets, which
I'm still trying to find - if anyone sees a small black messenger bag at St
John with a couple brewing books and a bunch of handouts in it, that would
be it.)

Planning ahead for extra and/or backup teachers in case someone gets called
away on the day-of is sounding like a good idea too.

I think that's the highlights?

Thanks,
Dena
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/makerspace-keymembers/attachments/20160204/81b1fe40/attachment.html>