I hope everyone had a safe and happy New Years Eve. On this first day of the new year I wanted to share a few things the officer group has been working on and discuss the goals I would like to see us achieve this coming year. First off I want to thank Paul Brown for his years of service as President. I am happy and privileged to be able to continue to work together with him serving the Club in 2017. Speaking of working together one item that came up during our last election in November was roles and responsibilities within the club. My take away was if these roles and our overall process was clearly defined we might have more interest from our members in serving as a club officer. With that in mind the newly elected and previous officers met and came up with a constitution clearly defining roles and a process for the club. That proposed constitution can be found on our website under About > DOZE Constitution and By Laws. Please take a moment to read it and we will review and vote on it during our January meeting.  In regards to meetings I have updated our meeting dates section of the website to reflect all the meeting days for 2017. I also embedded a google calendar on that page. We plan to use that calendar for tracking event’s, meetings, gatherings, jockey box rentals etc. So feel free to link it with your calendar and never miss out on a fun DOZE function in 2017.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is direction and goals for 2017. As many of you most likely already read we made some changes to the Beer of the Month (BOTM) comp. We have included a more style focused comp every other month. This serves two purposes, first it allows our members to learn more about classic styles. Secondly it pushes our members to possibly brew styles they might not necessarily of done so otherwise. The side effect we are hoping to see from this is our members will have more and different beers they can enter into competitions. The other hopeful side effect ties into my overall goal for the club in 2017. I would like to see a few of our members become recognized BJCP judges in 2017. So I will schedule at least one if not two talks about that subject in 2017. I also understand not all our members might be interested in competition and or becoming a BJCP Judge. So rest assured I will not dominate our time and resources to that end. But I do encourage our members to participate in both these goals of competing and learning about beer judging. Maybe it will lead to a chicken dinner…