Questions about homebrew clubs

Have you been to the club section on the AHA homepage?
http://ahaclubs.homebrewersassociation.org/Management

If you haven't seen their web page yet, check out the Maltose Falcons page, a southern California based club. BA Drew Beechum (@drewbage) has been a long-time Falcon and probably can tell you lots more.

 

The short version is that a club can be as well organized or as loosely organized as the members want it. It can be as little as a group of people getting together occasionally to shoot the breeze and maybe brew, maybe drink beer, maybe not, all the way to organizations with ranks of officers to rival the military, and strictly specified roles, meeting rules and so forth.
When you listed in the original post, please do not take those youtube videos as to how a club HAS to be run - there doesn't HAVE to be a speech / presentation at every meeting, contests, t-shirts and so on - but some of the more organized clubs do that.
Often times there is a club president - someone who takes the lead on organizing things, many times for individual events members will take leads on each event. Many clubs do charge dues to help out with club costs. Each club will again have their own rules about who can join, how they leave, and if they need to be kicked out. Some are extremely loose (whoever shows up is in the club) others may have long and drawn out membership procedures.

 

Our club has 4 officers President, Vice President, treasurer, and Secretary. Our only official member list is an email list that anybody can be on. We meet once a month and usually have some program which can be a contest. We charge 2 dollars to everyone that comes to a meeting and occasionally get some donations. Our only real costs are our web hosting. A lot of discussion has gone around about insurance, member lists, and how to pay for them if we decide to go a more formal way.

 

My club has open membership. Anyone can join and attend whatever meetings they want. We meet one afternoon per month (for about 3 hours) and the only officer is our president. His main role is to lead the meetings and decide the order in which the home brews are consumed. In addition, he notifies us of different homebrew contests and events in the region, and he organizes different club activities such as SMASH brews where everyone brews the same single malt single hop recipe except everyone chooses a differenthop to feature. Other times, everyone will use the same malt and hop recipe but everyone will use a different yeast. Other times everything about the recipe will be consistent except the base malt. In addition, he will organize bulk grain-buys and bulk keg-buys so we get wholesale pricing. Sometimes he will also setup outside meetings where someone purchases an off-flavor kit and we all meet to get a better understanding of each possible off flavor