Flying Bike Annual Meeting the Third

Thanks for coming out to the third Flying Bike Cooperative Brewery Annual Meeting! They just keep getting better and better! It was great to see so many people come out and spend the day with us. There were a lot of folks that have been around awhile, a lot of low member numbers, as well as lots of new folks. We even had a handful of new members sign up at the meeting!

We're really getting great traction. We saw it at the International Beer Fest this summer, where we had people approaching our table knowing who we are. Some folks bee-lined to us because they wanted to talk to us about Flying Bike, but the point I want to make is that they already knew who we were, they'd heard of us, etc. It's so great to be at a point where people have heard of us.

I digress. The reason I bring this up is that a few of the new members that joined at the meeting said something along the lines of "I've heard of you guys, I've been meaning to join, and today's the day!". That's what made the meeting for me.

It also seemed like the annual meetings are getting easier and easier to throw. I think it's a combo of the board of directors being more experienced at it, but also members think "Oh, it's autumn, so the Flying Bike Annual meeting is rolling around". It certainly helped that Machine House brewed our most recent competition winner, Airship Ale. The winner of that competition, Bob Yeaw, stopped in to the meeting and grabbed the last pint of Airship Ale! We went through two kegs of it! We had a little fireside chat with Bob, check it out here!

Some other high points - we changed the way voting worked this year, which meant that members could vote in-person at the meeting. We have several folks from Central Co-op that are members of Flying Bike; we had some great conversations with them, and we look forward to some collaborative, cooperative projects coming up! We had a new food truck, Neema's Comfort Food, serving some delicious BBQ; seriously, their ribs were incredible!

Our board president, Ryan Vanderpol, and board Vice President Kevin Badger gave a great presentation that covered events we've done over the past year, where we are currently in terms of planning and financials, and what we have in store for the upcoming year.

The grand finale for the meeting was announcing the board election winners! Ryan Vanderpol, Melissa Brown Kerson, and Erinn Hale won! The Amendment to our Articles of Incorporation that will allow us to raise money for building out the brewery also passed. We'll have a bigger writeup on that in our next email newsletter, so watch for that!

I'd like to sum up by saying that our 2013 annual meeting was all sorts of awesome, the best we've done, and we could not have done it without all of our members; thanks for believing in the co-op model, believing in community beer, participating in a democratic brewery, and coming out to drink and eat and hang out with us on a gorgeous Saturday in September!