So if your read Day 1 about our trip up to Madison, WI you know what is going on. If not just go back to yesterday's posting and read up. Our judging day started with us showing up about 8 AM to get checked in. Myself and our male friend were judging while my wife and our female friend were stewarding. Also from MUGZ we had two other gentleman come up to judge the day of judging.
I will explain a bit about judging at the first round of NHC. It is a fun day as well as a long and grueling day. I know some may say tasting 30+ beers in a day is not grueling, but it is far from as easy as you may imagine. Also the job of a steward is even harder on a person and at times the stewards do not receive enough credit.
So as I said we arrive about 8 AM to check in and then we milled around until about 8:45 AM to allow the stewards to prepare the tables with everything we needed to properly judge beer. This includes pencils, erasers, staplers, cups, bread, score sheets and a few other things I am forgetting right now. We are told to find our assigned table and our assigned partner to get ready for our first round of judging. In all we judged three sessions on Saturday.
So once we are seated the competition director laid out the ground rules and then the stewards brought around the calibration beer. The purpose of the calibration beer is to warm up the senses and see where you are in relation to your partner. The calibration beer is only done first thing in the morning and at more and more competitions it is not done at all.
Once we have that done the stewards brought us our first beer, at a competition this size the stewards bring us our next beer when we are done judging the previous beer. In the morning I judged stouts, we had 8 judging pairs for stout. In total there were 80 stouts in this competition with 20 of them being RIS ( Russian Imperial Stouts). My judging partner and I judged a total of 11 stouts. Since there were 80 total beers judged by 8 judging pairs that meant that there would be a mini- BOS to chose the top 3 beers for the style. So we passed on two beers into the mini-BOS, and in the mini-BOS the three ranking judges of the group chose from 16 beers for the top 3 beers.
The top three beers from each category go onto the 2nd round of NHC which is held in conjunction with the National Homebrewers Conference. This year it will be held in San Diego, CA. Oh what a wonderful place that would be to go to, but alas it just is not feasible this year. At the second round it is decided the top 3 beers in each style from across the US and Canada. So it is quite an honor to place in each region let alone the top 3 overall.
Besides beer the mead and cider categories are contested during this competition as well. For those that do not know what a mead is it is a fermented alcoholic beverage made from honey. A hard cider is a fermented beverage made from apple, with a category made with pears called perrys. The ciders and perrys are judged together.
Once we finished with the the first session we were able to have lunch. Also during the lunch break the stewards cleaned up after the first session and made the tables ready for session two. Session two I judged Belgian Strong Ales, this time my judging partner and I judged 10 beers. There were 5 judging pairs so around 50 ales to judge. I was involved in judging mini-BOS which we were quickly able to decide on the top three beers that will continue on to the second round.
So once the second session was finished the stewards quickly turned around the table for the third session of the day. For the third session I judged Smoked and Wood- Aged beers. This is a hard category to judge since the base beer style can be any style the brewer wants and the amount of smoke and wood aging varies as well. I think overall there were about 32 beers in the category and we judged 11 in total. This session I did not get to judge the mini-BOS, but my judging partner did and the three beers we passed on to the mini-BOS wound up going 1 2 3. With the winner being a porter which was dry hopped with smoked, cooked bacon and no it was not as bad as you imagine.
The event was held at Vintage Brewing Company http://vintagebrewingcompany.com/ . I want to thank the people at Vintage for hosting us as well as the hosting committee which was made up by members of MHTG http://www.mhtg.org/. Once the judging of session three was over the organizers made a few more announcements and then did a drawing for the some swag. During the drawing I had one of Vintage's beers Better Off Red, they describe it as a hopped up American Red Ale. It was quite good and would have another any time. After a dinner break on our own they provided a bus to go around the town to various establishments.
We went back to Sprecher's for dinner and had another great meal accompanied by the same delicious beers we had the night before. Unfortunately for me I did not feel overly well so I passed on going out that night for a bus ride to some of Madison's fine drinking establishments. Well guess they will be there the next time we are in town.
Tomorrow day three which is the ride and a stop or two along the way back to the QC.
QC Beerguy
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