a wasted member of our table showed up late. I grabbed/ate his salad as they were going to clear the plate. The thought of them throwing that goat cheese away was not something I was willing to chance.
(they did bring him another salad when his drunk ass eventually stumbled in.)
Mike Barbalis and I dove into the radishes. They go great with Obatzda, pretzels and beer. In fact you can get a large spiral cut white radish to go along with the order of Bretzlen und Obatzda in the Munich biergartens.
I bit into one towards the end of the awards because nobody at the table touched them… Regret. lol.
I also thought of another thing I didn’t like too much about the banquet… The beers… Boston Lager was the highlight as far as beers go during the meal…
You are not a salad person, as you said.
Oh? They were suppose to be in the salad? I guess I just wasn’t sure what to do with them…and nobody else at the table could figure it out either. So I just grabbed one and bit into it like an apple.
That guy was wildly entertaining!
Fantastic conference overall. GR is a picturesque city that is very clean and beautifully renovated. The local folks seem friendly and courteous. The host hotel was amazing and from what I heard the overflow hotels were great as well. The DuVos center was very accommodating with spacious meeting rooms and timely service, although I’ll also vouch for the poor audio during the welcome reception and banquet night.
The seminars that I attended were informative and interesting. I really haven’t heard any complaints. I attended 6 seminars that were all worthwhile.
I judged the National competition that went rather smoothly. The judging environment was very comfortable and the competition seemed very organized and flowed well. There were plenty of experienced judges on hand to accommodate the number of entries. Very relaxed atmosphere and a well executed competition.
The welcome reception was fun but I would like to see more brewery representation and better signage. I did get to meet one brewer.
Banquet night was a lot of fun. The food was awesome, the beer was good and the comradery was second to none. The audio was poor at best.
All in all the conference was a huge success. Hats off to the AHA staff and the local committee!
Good point on the judging. It went really smoothly I felt. Only slight hiccup was they issues they had with the software where many judges were unassigned at the start and had to get manual assignments… Thankfully I didn’t fall in to that category. So for me apart from a slight delay at the start of judging it was all smooth sailing. The sour ales I judged were all quite nice too. I think I gave 3/8-9 40+
Forgot to mention a very important point that the breweries and brewpubs are abound in this very, very fine beer city. Got to go to Hopcat Brewery, Grand Rapids Brewery, B.O.B., Brewery Vivant and Founders. All had good to great beer.
Thanks again to Crispy, Fred and crew!
Since others brought it up, the judging assignments was kinda crap.
1 - no labels - thanks for nothing - it’s very minor, I brought my own, but if you can print out a sheet you can make labels.
2 - long line for judge registration - seemed completely silly. They had to mark your name off a sheet, I can mark my own name off a sheet. I skipped the line and turned in my sheet. If I passed you, I’m not sorry, I see no reason to wait in a long line when I printed my sheet ahead of time.
3 - I recruited a judge from another table so we could make four pairs. Seems odd I would have to do that. The other table had something like 12 judges and we had 7. It wasn’t a big deal, but had it not happened we would have slowed in our entry judging.
4 - I heard some group of judges sent 4 beers to the mini-BOS. Really? Can you not decide on the best three beers from your flight? Are you all first time judges? (If this was you, yes I am calling you out.)
5 - I heard one group took HOURS to judge their flight. That is ridiculous. If you had two judges and 36 beers you should finish in 360 minutes. 4 judges 180 minutes, 6 judges 90 minutes, etc. (If this was you, yes I am calling you out. Speed up or let everyone know you probably should not be judging because the pyramids were built in less time.) [If I’ve missed some critical fact let me know, but to start judging at 9am and not finish till 1:30+ seems to indicate a problem with the judge panel.]
Positives
1 - our stewards were awesome
2 - 2nd beers from the cellar were retrieved very, very quickly
3 - plenty of cups, sheets, etc - again, our stewards were awesome
4 - no egos at our table - well, except mine
5 - our stewards were awesome 
I did forget about the lack of labels… It was only a minor annoyance for me. I didn’t bring any but I just pre filled out my sheets while waiting for judge assignments.
Yeah I stood in the line for a bit but then Dan came up and down the line and was grabbing the sheets from everyone… What he did fail to do after he did this was let us know we didn’t need to stand in line anymore… So I proceeded to continue to stand in line lol. A few people told me they heard it announced you didn’t need to stand in line if you had the sheet. I didn’t hear it.
I didn’t stick around to see anything else going on. I didn’t even talk to other tables while I was up there. I basically just hammered out out flight and jetted… Didn’t even do mini-BOS so I can’t comment on anything else. I finished right when the expo was opening and figured I would just head down there
I heard there was a database crash in Boulder, and half the registered judges were gone. My wife asked our friend who has run comps to help the person already at the table, but only so much could be done to help the situation.
Brought leftover labels from another comp, as I have found that to be a pragmatic solution.
As to a certain well known nation judge being slow, well, we know. :
Ms. R, the head steward, will appreciate your comments on the awesome stewards.
I’ll post a few of my I observations as well. Let it 've known this was my second conference as I was in Philly last year.
Overall I thought the conference was a huge success. Every event has its hiccups and this was no exception but it was still a great event. I loved how the expo and the social club had a lot more room than last year. Made the expo much easier to get around. I also loved the beer at the expo. Having the professional brewers bring most of the beer there and serving all three days was better to me than one single night.
I didn’t attend a lot of seminars since my wife came and that really wasn’t here thing. Instead I took a few trips around town going to founders and Rockford brewing. All places were very accommodating and had excellent beers. I was lucky to have a vehicle there but felt GR was much easier to get around and had better breweries within walking distance than last year.
The couple things I didn’t like were the after hours social well or whatever they called it. Was weird to just have thousands of people exit club night and have the social well in the lobby area of Devos center. I was expecting it to be in one of the ballrooms or somewhere else.
The banquet food was much better than last year and was very very good. Sean outdid himself this time. The beer was not as good. I was much more impressed with the offerings from rogue last year than what Sam Adams brought this year.
All in all, thought is was an A grade conference and would fully expect GR to host it again in the future. I hope to be able to get to San Diego next year as I hear it’s a great beer city and wonderful weather.
Re: the sound…if they would have flown a small line array to focus the sound it would have gone a long way. The small JBL speakers they had distributed around the room just made things worse.
Except for what the locals call the June gloom. It was chilly and overcast until afternoon. I will bring a vest.
Yes, the Stewards were Amazingly Awesome!
(And they usually do it with little or no recognition or credit.)
My crew rocked!!!
BTW, I was told (more than once) that I was “scary”. But I was just trying to keep things flowing while putting out fires.
The table stewards worked their asses off.
That was my lambic, and no, it didn’t win. But thanks for the vote of confidence, and San Diego for sure…
I liked last year more because the entrance went through the social area, not to the side of a BN broadcast where no one could enter. But what I really ment was the after events social hour. It was just outside the halls. Having it in an area in the hotel last year worked really well I thought.
One difference was that very few AHA events were in the Hotel(s) this year. There were 2 wedding parties in the Amway Grand on Saturday night.
I believe HBT is a registered club as is Chop and Brew.
FYI… The Brewing Network CLUB was not setup by Justin or anyone on the BN staff. It was a BN listener that didn’t have a local club near them. I’ve won under the BN club before but since have joined a local club and always enter under them. Justin accepts the award for the BN club, but has always made an effort to get those prizes out to the actually winners (he gave away a whole Lost Abbey gift set that the club won last year to the winners).
I think Club-only comp points for the first part of the year were included since they still had those comps through May/June. I believe this is where the BN get a bunch of points.
Regardless, the rules were followed and the BN Army won fair and square. Ask the GC to bring up the issue this year and change the rules, but you do so by alienating several members with no local club.
The booing this year was the worse it’s been in the past three years. There was more of that than people applauding. It really is a shame, and puts a black mark on a substantial percentage of the AHA membership.