20 July 2010

Indiana Brewers' Cup 2010

Saturday, July 10th marked the reception for the 13th Annual Brewers' Cup.

Judges worked Friday and Saturday afternoon deciding which beers, both professional and homebrew, fit best into the categories assigned by the Beer Judge Certification Program. These beer judges work hard to earn their rank and they take the job of judging seriously. We had the pleasure of sitting in on the Best of Show judging and thoroughly enjoyed the proceedings. It seems that a judging session relies on individual scoring and collaboration between the table of judges.

These guys know their stuff and it was a really great experience to see how it is really done. It's like a KOTBR roundtable, except they all know what they are talking about!





The ceremony started with the homebrew awards and a wonderful presentation of food. There was no doubt that MECA Homebrewers were going to walk away with a few awards, as they submitted almost twice as many entries (148) than the next highest homebrew club, Foam Blowers of Indiana (FBI) (77). Entries were placed in one of 24 categories including the Woodford Reserve Challenge. At Winterfest back in January, Woodford Reserve offered barrels to interested Indiana homebrew clubs. The homebrew clubs worked together to come up with a beer to age in the barrels until the Brewers' Cup competition where a winner would be selected. The winner of this challenge was the Duneland Homebrew Club from Northwest Indiana.

In the other 23 categories, MECA ended up going home with 34 of the 72 medals awarded. Not to mention Homebrew Club of the year. There were a lot of familiar faces being called up for awards and we congratulate all of them!



As the professional awards were being presented, you could easily see how supportive many of the brewers were for each other. Congratulations to the 13 Indiana brewers who took awards home to their breweries. Special congratulations to Mark at Oaken Barrel for taking Brewery of the Year for the third straight year and Liz Laughlin from Rock Bottom College Park for winning the Best of Show award for her Simcoe IPA. A full list of awards can be found at the Brewers' Cup website.

Mark Havens, brewer - Oaken Barrel Brewing Co.


Liz Laughlin, brewer - Rock Bottom College Park

Visit Indiana Beer for more information on the homebrew clubs in the state.

1 comment:

  1. The cask version of Liz's beer was very tasty.

    ReplyDelete