Good Time At FWIW Homebrew Contest

General Homebrew Discussion
1

Judged at For What Its Wort, a homebrew contest in Bloomington/Normal IL sponsored by the ABNormal Brewers.  I got Belgian and French in the morning, and Smoke/Wood in the afternoon.  Judged with National ranked judges both sessions which is always a privilege.  MY wife stewarded and did her usual excellent job.  I understand they had about 200 entries and 20 judges so we weren’t swamped with samples.  Lunch was a fantastic smoked brisket with a mustard BBQ sauce.  Didn’t stay for the BOS so I don’t know what won, I can say that the level of beers I tasted was very high.  This is why I judge, to see what can be done in a homebrew setting.

We were also given free tickets to a beer festival that evening, called Bruegala.  Live music, BBQ and nachos, and over 200 different bottled beers for tasting.  The tasting bldg was a madhouse but we managed to taste 15 beers before my liver gave out.  Had an Alesmith Strong Scotch and the Best By from Stone, offerings from Two Brothers and Five Rabbits out of Chicago, as well as Bretagne that I had not heard of before.  There were others of course and I didn’t hit all I thought would be worthwhile, maybe if I hadn’t judged the same day I would have gone longer.

Anyway, just thought I’d describe a little about judging a homebrew contest so it would inspire people to get out and judge.

2

Seconded…I was judging there as well, and it was a great time. Lots of outstanding beers, and like you said, lunch was wonderful!

3

I posted this wondering if there were other beer forum people at the event.  You were the only one so far.  Prost!

4

I didn’t/couldn’t make it but I know one of my other business partners Joshi went, along with a few other BUZZ club members who said it was a nice event.

5

Yeah I talked to Joshi a bit, sounds like the microbrewery is going well.  Are you brewing with him on that Anthony?  And I judged with Joel during the morning session.  So BUZZ certainly showed up in force.

6

I need to check this forum more often. At five posts, I can hardly qualify as a ‘forum person’  :wink:

I’m one of the guys from STL - we spoke about Missouri Malt.

7

I handle the brewing, he handles the distribution, our third partner handles the legal/accounting.

8

Good to hear, you certainly have the homebrew cred.  Does that transfer to a microbrewery setup?

Jeff, I remember you now, MoMalt is a great place.

9

Some basic aspects like recipe formulation, fermentation management (to some degree!) and such transfer well but, at least in my experience, you can’t just linearly scale a recipe and expect a certain result. Most of the disruption comes from the equipment where the brew system itself isn’t just a scaled replica of your homebrew setup so hop additions change, dry hopping changes, etc.

It is a lot of fun though, definitely worse jobs in the world.

10

Was planning on attending but got called away at the last minute.  A couple of the MUGZ crew did show up and said they had a good time.  I’m putting the comp on my schedule for next year.