snakeplissken

Sampled beers today for the largest and oldest homebrew competition in the state of Oregon. Last night I judged a flight of 11 beers in the English Pale Ale class consisting of the standard, premium bitter, and ESB. Some really mixed examples, some pretty not so good. This morning I was assigned to Baltic Porters, a sub-style of Porter which itself is a very large class with a lot of entries. These are supposed to be the big boys, but for the most part all were below style and a little disappointing. Next came American Ambers, a sub-style of American Ale. This was by far the most difficult as it's a fairly ambiguous style and tough to nail down. All in all a lot of fun and a good reason to literally drink beer all day.

I entered my Buckwheat Sweet Stout into the Sweet Stout class, a sub-style of the Stout category which also consists of Dry, Oatmeal, Foreign Export, American, and Russian Imperial styles. Overall there were 50 entries into the Stout category, and 7 in my sub-style. I managed to win my sub-style and I advanced to the best of style taste-off with the other 5 beers from the other sub-styles. Sadly, I didn't ribbon, but I'm quite happy with my score of 39/50 on a logarithmic scale and the fact I beat 44/50 of the other entries in one of the more difficult categories.

I also entered it into a specialty category as it contained a large portion of buckwheat. I actually was to receive the third place ribbon when one particular judge decided to convince the other judges to bump me in favor of a Belgian IPA. For some reason they did, and that particular judges wife took my third place ribbon for her Belgian IPA. I'm a little pissed to tell the truth, but there's not much I can do about it except hope karma puts it in his butt.

So today was some good, some bad. I learned a lot and got some excellent feedback along with the pride of being given such a high score by some recognized and seriously qualified judges. That's award enough for now.