I was wondering what advancing to the mini BOS means in the first round
Hopefully you’re asking because your beer(s) did go to mini-BOS…
It means you had one of the best 10 or so beers judged by a judge team.
It means that the flight (category) was so large that it had to be split into a number of smaller “sub-flights”. Then the “sub-flight” judge team (usually 2-3 judges) felt that beer was one of the top one or two or three beers in the part of the flight they judged. Then usually the top-ranked judges for that flight evaluate those top couple of beers from each judge team to see what beers should be ranked 1, 2, 3 from that flight (category) and sent on to the 2nd round in June. It’s called mini-best-of-show but really it’s determining which are the best beers from a large flight and determining 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place–so going on to mini-BOS means it’s actually “best of the sub-flight” and going to the next level of “best of flight (category)”.
I hope that makes sense. If you entered, good luck in the competition!
it makes perfect sense, and yes I am asking because I did make mini-bos with a munich helles. I am new to this and wasn’t sure what this meant. thanks for the explanation
Hi Akloco,
Gail covered the concept pretty well, but I thought I’d give a little background information on the mini-BOS concept. (Sorry I didn’t see your post earlier.)
In the National Homebrew Competition, if a category has more than 10-12 entries, then it will be judged in 2 or more flights by different sets of judges. In order to remove any personal biases of the different sets of judges involved in a category, the mini-BOS enables the top 3 entries from each flight to be evaluated by the senior ranking judge from each flight. The mini-BOS judging does not re-score each entry, instead they evaluate each entry (without the scores) and chose the top 3 placing entries as those which best exemplify the style. Sometimes when one group of judges has a tendency to score high and another group scores their flight lower, the beers that are picked in the mini-BOS as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place entries may not have the highest point total. I know it’s disappointing for a brewer with a score sheet matching the Maximum Score for the category to not have their entry place, but that is how it works sometimes.
Anyway, I hope this helps.
Cheers,
Janis
Janis Gross
National Homebrew Competition Director
AHA Project Coordinator
janis@brewersassociation.org