50 Years of Beer in One Book

If you go trolling through the newsletter archives (we have many issues going back to the first issue in 1976), you'll find that the Falcons have never been very shy about sharing beer recipes with each other. It's a way to learn what makes for a successful (or not...) beer. 

You'll also discover that every once in a while, someone gets a bright idea and suggests "We Should Make A Recipe Book!", but with the exception of Todd Etzel's herculean effort back during the 25th Anniversary, it doesn't happen. (Turns out that assembling, writing, laying out and printing a book is a lot of work!)

This year for the 50th, we had the same bright idea! And it almost slipped into the wind like another "ooh, we should have done that" except we got approached by the AHA to provide a recipe for "Learn to Homebrew Day". That started me into recipe collection mode and preparing a list of recipes that would capture a width and breadth of what we've done over the years, but here's a secret - I'm good at collecting, cajoling, collating, writing and getting material together, but layout and actually making a book, nope!

Fortunately, Jamie Crawford stepped up and took care of that part! Together we worked from a big Google Sheet to track what recipes had come in, what stage of the process they were in and where they'd end up in the book!

I took all of our newsletters and the emails we've sent out over the years and uploaded them to Google NotebookLM. That helped find events, recipes and what not (it's not perfect, go figure, but it's handy and I'll share a link to our notebook to anyone who cares to poke around). I used the Internet Archive to gather lost data from previous incarnations of MaltoseFalcons.com

All year long as we brewed collab beers, folks would send me recipe details so could have all of our 50th Anniversary recipes in place along with other identified "Anniversary Beers". People sent in recipes that they're known for or that the club has an association with.

We took all of our targeted recipes, set them into a more modern, readable format and made educated guesses to fill in some gaps as they appeared. And then we decided to organize them by a version of the guidelines we used for the 2020 COVID Mayfaire which themselves were inspired by the first set of published Falcons guidelines for the "Springfest" (later the Mayfaire)

So in the book you'll find recipes in the following sections:

• 50th Anniversary Collaborations
• Anniversary Beer
• Belgiany
• Dark Colored Ale
• Dark Colored Lager
• Hoppy
• Light Colored Ale
• Mead
• Stout, Porter, Bock
• Unusual

There's also a collection of Falcons Logos over the year and an extensive timeline of club history and activities as best as we've been able to discern them! So much stuff!

And with Jamie handling the layout, all that was left was to get this thing printed in such a way that we didn't end up losing our feathers. Thankfully, things are easier  now with "print on demand" platforms like Amazon's Kindle Direct. POD systems make it low risk for us to create a book. (We took a loss on the 25th Anniversary books because we bought too many and never sold enough to cover the printing costs). Jamie created both a pdf for a physical print and a epub for use on Kindles and e-readers. 

Both versions are available now at Amazon and the club gets money for each copy sold. (More from the Kindle version, oddly!) 

To buy your very own copy you can follow these links - Physical Print (maltosefalcons.com/50thBook) and E-Book (maltosefalcons.com/50thKindle)