Beer Awards
Well i’m going to send in my Schild Brau today to the USBTC. That is short for the United States Beer Tasting Championship. www.usbtc.com. Doug over at Johns Grocery in Iowa City received an award for his Belgian White ale, as the best Belgian Wit in the Midwest. I’m not sure how many beers he was up against, but I imagine there must have been a few. Aren’t they making Celis White in Michigan now? Of course Pizza Port in California took the award in the National category. That is a truly amazing brewery. He suggests I enter my Schild Brau in the Amber Lager category. I see that Eliot Ness from the Great Lakes Brewing Co took the award in that category last year. Well that is a good beer, I have had it myself, so I would love to see how the Schild Brau does up against it. I’m still pretty pumped up about winning the GABF bronze medal.
I really respect beer competitions where there are not too many medals awarded. This USBTC just does one award per category, which is nice. I have to say my least favorite one is the All About Beer sponsored World Beer Championships. They give ‘ratings’ like 89 or 90, and anything above say 90 is a gold medal. This is how many wine competitions work. It dilutes the award because they may be giving away ten gold medals out of twenty entries. Because of this I don’t even pay attention to medals on wine labels. But when someone wins a medal at the GABF it is a big deal. They only give away three medals per category and sometimes no medal at all if they feel like none of the entries are deserving. To make the World Beer Championships even worse, you can just pay to have your rating from last year resubmitted into the magazine the following year. That is just plain advertising!
Its really not an accident that many breweries win repeated medals at the GABF or World Beer Cup year after year. This a sign that they are truly great and consistent brewers. Often times you will see that some breweries win again and again, and then drop of the winner lists after a few years. Its always because the people who made that beer excellent have left the brewery. You can see the same thing at our award history. We are beginning to turn this place around!
December 2nd, 2003 at 10:15 am
Aaron,
We look forward to having you in our competition. I agree with your comments that the competitions that mean the most are those that don’t hand out “awards” to a large percentage of entries. Your GABF awards certainly speak volumes to the quality of your product.
We do this for the love of the craft and a desire to share the news about great beers in the US.
Cheers!
Scott Ingersoll
USBTC Regional Coordinator
December 5th, 2003 at 3:05 am
Great to hear from you Scott!
I just sent my Schild Brau Amber off to you yesterday. On your website it does not say much about who your organization is. You do not charge for your entries either. How is that you are able to do all of this, are you aligned with a homebrew club of some sort?
That said, I really do like your categories. Your emphasis on regional winners in a category is really novel and realistic. Its really more relevant to recognize the great beers that are available in an area, than to know that some brewery in far off Hawaii or Alaska is the best. You may never get a chance to try those beers, while an almost as good locally made beer may be totally ignored.
Even more so, its kind of unfair to compare a west coast beer to a midwest beer, where palates are very different. Our Stout is a good example, I think, of a beer that is very mild for its ‘category’, but here in Iowa, its almost more than people can handle! It does not have enough roast malts to ever succeed in any of the stout or porter categories at the GABF. Infact I should probably enter it under experimental, because we make it with a lager yeast as well!
Ahh, I could talk about this all day.
Cheers
Aaron