It’s competition time again. Every year we enter the Great American Beer Festival. It’s the largest beer festival and commercial beer competition in the United States and MAN is it a good time. More about the GABF another time…although you should click through to the link there’s a pretty cool little video there called GABF in a minute. Anyway, there’s another big comp every two years called the World Beer Cup. As the name implies it’s an international competition. I’m always stoked about WBC ’cause we get to go head to head with european brewers and we get to see how the european judges rank our products. This is a pretty big deal to us especially since Bob B. from Delaware county Pennsylvania and Head Brewer of Iron Hill Media actually beat out the largest and oldest producers of true Lambic beer a few years ago at this very event! Nice! It’s not that I’m a super nationalistic guy or anything, I just like it when we measure up…or frankly, plain old beat, the world class producers of our favorite styles in blind professional judging. If you’ve seen the movie Bottle Shock imagine Bob is the blonde kid whose dad’s Chardonnay beat the French, except that Bob is the kid and his dad rolled into one. O.K. so that was a little off of the story. Oh, that’s a photo of the award for our Abbey Dubbel a few years back for WBC. Beat the Trappists! I say “bring it” to the monks.
As usual we have an intense and exhaustive program for deciding which of our beers will be heading to the comp. I think some of the toughest competition for an award is actually on OUR table. Lots of great beers never get entered ’cause we can only enter one per style. We taste each style that we’ve brewed blind in a head to head competition to pick an entrant. This year Russian Imperial Stout was a really stiff category. There were at least 3 different versions and all of them were world class. No suprise, Bob’s Russian won the day. Nice work! That guy is a machine
Our beers are on their way to Chicago and we will be joining them shortly. Good luck to everyone.
