Made my first journey to Tulsa to judge at this event. I’ve seen lots of FOAM members medal at other comps, wanted to get a sense of what their club was like and meet a few of the members. Judged with some very experienced people and learned a lot. They had about 750 entries but thanks to some weekday flights things weren’t chaotic on Friday and Saturday. In fact it was a very well-run comp. My compliments to Dave and Desiree.
I didn’t enter anything this time, just thought I’d see how that felt. I think I’ll go back to entering a few beers, it gives you a little more to look forward to.
Hopefully some of you medaled in this comp. If I judged your brew, I hope I was gentle.
All in all I thought I did well. there was only one instance where I’d written out my score sheet and then compared to my colleague, and he’d observed just the opposite of what I had. It was a barlewine that I thought had a ton of hop character and not enough malt, he’d written it up just the other way around.
That Belgian Blondes and Tripels flight was a lot of work but we plowed through it fairly fast…
Looks like you judged Strong Ales with Gary? I’m going to get back at him for robbing me of IPA gold. ;D
FOAM has an excellent core group featuring several extremely talented brewers and judges, and then gets a great assist from the rest of their gang who aren’t slouches in their own right. I envy their organization. Next year I plan to leave out the beer entries as I want in on judging that awesome BOS table. :o
Thanks for the gold in 19 Strong Ales I know the brewer that took silver too and I heard it was pretty close between us.
And I hate to sound like I’m bragging (I know, I am), but I had a bunch of entries and ended up with 2x golds (19C & 23A), a silver (2A) and a bronze (20A). I’m chuffed to bits! I’m excited to get all my scoresheets back.
there were three of us with 20 entries, I was guessing you were one of the others…
I THOUGHT one of the barleywines tasted like last year’s winner - congrats!
It was great to meet you tomsayer & many thanks for making the trek this far south to help us judge! Part of the fun for us is hosting our out-of-town homebrew brethren & enjoying the comraderie. Hopefully as the competition grows, we can expand the activities to include a pub crawl & maybe guest speaker(s)? I’ll pass along the compliments to Des, as she’s not on here much. Thanks also rjharper, tcanova & of course ububdawg for the support!
I did judge strong ales with Gary, we sent two fine American barleywines forward but I think they both wound up out of the money. The top three were all very tasty, my personal favorite was the third place beer.
This was also my first trek down to Tulsa to judge at FOAM Cup and I had a great time judging American Browns/Ambers, Ciders, and American IPAs. It’s an amazing event, many thanks to Desiree, Dave, and the rest of the FOAM crew for putting it on. I hope to see you guys again at NHC first round next year.
I know the brewer that took silver too and I heard it was pretty close between us.
