Results are up for the GTA Brews Summer Showdown 2015! As we begin to wrap up our first competition run as a club I must say it went rather well. We planned for 20-30 entries in our club only competition and we had a total of 35 entries judged, all local to the GTA. Congrats to Matt Sulker and his Best of Show winning IPA! Congrats to all the winners! Scores have been input to the system, and score sheets will be emailed out to participants in a few days.
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Lots of lessons learned to take into organizing Brew Slam 2015 competition in the fall, thanks to our judges Tina, Kyle,Craig, Geof, Tim, and Nick for their patience, staying late, and sticking through! Thanks to Andrew for organizing, and opening his house to entry drop off and the judging night! In the future we’ll try to make sure that we start early enough to wrap up judging by 10 pm, we ended up going past midnight this time.
This was also a dry run for using a queued judging method, something we picked up while judging the AWOG 2015 in Buffalo. This means each beer was only opened right before being judged, instead of being served in a flight of 8-12 beers (as done in most competitions in Canada). This gives each entry a fairer chance compared to possibly falling at the end of the flight and losing all aromatics before the judge gets to the beer. In addition queued judging is supposed to offer faster throughput in larger competitions since slower judges will judge less beers and faster judges will judge more. More information about queued judging for those who are curious.
As we ramp up for our first big competition in the fall, we’re glad we got the chance to run a competition on the smaller scale first so we have a better idea which tasks need to be done ahead of time and where we will need to help to ensure a smooth and well organized competition. In order to pull off this style of competition at a larger scale we are going to need many more stewards than normal, one for every four judges. We will be doing some active recruiting for stewards and judges over the coming weeks, so remember to save the dates Oct 2nd (evening) and Oct 3rd (all day) in your calendars, it’s going to be a fantastic beer filled weekend where Toronto gets to judge beers from the best homebrewers from across the country.