October 2026

Monthly Meeting

• Date: October 17th

• Start Time: 11 am – 12 pm

• Location: Old 121 Brewhouse

• Address: 2010 S Oak St, Lakewood, CO 80227

Guest speaker alert! In October we will have Brandon from The Real Dill come talk to us. There will be samples of their pickles and bloody mary mix, which is perfect for both bloody mary’s as well as mixed into beer to make micheladas. While they don’t ferment their pickles, Brandon is a big fan of fermentation. We look forward to seeing you there.

December Quarterly Challenge

This quarterly challenge is High ABV. For this challenge the only requirement is for your fermentation to be at least 7% ABV. This can also be a great segue into the September 2027's Aged Fermentation Challenge. A lot of high ABV fermentations do well with age, so if you need something for next year’s challenge make sure to keep some of this entry around. Looking forward to what everyone comes up with! Sign up and drop off details can be found here.

Up Coming Competitions

Rocky Mountain Homebrew Challenge

• Registration opens 09/01/2026, register here

• Entries are due 10/09/2026

Up Coming Events

Great American Beer Festival - October 10th & 11th 2026

The 2026 Great American Beer Festival is heading to Levitt Pavilion for a weekend packed with great brews, live music, and Colorado sunshine. Get your tickets here, if you haven’t already!

Colorado Homebrewers Conference - November 7th 2026

The Colorado Homebrewers Conference is back! This year it will be at Grimm Brothers Brewing in Loveland. Here’s what you can expect, a homebrew community day. Meet like-minded folks from around the state, see who has been winning your competitions, and learn how other clubs support their area. Great speakers, last year's lineup covered IPAs, yeast, Colorado's beer history, grains in Colorado, and much more. You can RSVP here.

Education Corner

BU/GU Ratio — Balancing Bitterness and Malt

The BU/GU ratio is a quick way to understand how bitter a beer will feel relative to its malt sweetness. You simply divide the beer’s IBUs (BU) by its gravity units (GU), where GU is the last two or three digits of your original gravity (for example, 1.050 = 50 GU). A pale ale at 40 IBUs and 50 GU gives a BU/GU of 0.80, meaning moderate bitterness with noticeable balance. Lower ratios (0.3–0.5) feel malt-forward, while higher ratios (1.0+) read sharp or aggressively bitter. It’s not a perfect predictor of flavor—but it’s a great tool to cross-check recipes and understand whether your hop schedule matches the style.

Using the BU/GU ratio also helps dial in hop intensity when scaling recipes. If you brew a favorite IPA at 1.070 and 70 IBUs (ratio 1.0) but want a session version at 1.048, targeting 48–50 IBUs keeps the same bitterness-to-sweetness balance. It’s one of the easiest ways to think about hop structure without getting bogged down in complicated math.