National Homebrew Competition 1st Round Results

Joe has another winning beer! His altbier ranked third in its category for the Great Lakes region of the American Homebrewer Association's: National Homebrew Competition. That's good enough to enter him into the finals for the National Homebrew Competition again this June in Baltimore. Click here to see the results for the first round. His result is under the Great Lakes, Category 7 (Amber hybrid beer). Oh yeah...my name is listed there too.

Unfortunately, his other two beers did not rank--Chocolate Stout & Irish Red Ale. Oh well. However, Joe is extremely happy with the results of the competition and was looking forward to getting the judges' feedback on his beers more than anything else.

I think that some guys entered about 20 different beers in the regional competition because they placed so many times...sometimes more than once in the same category. Sheesh...get a life. Joe said that he never would have been able to brew as much as these guys. And if you've ever been around Joe when he's brewing, you know that it's an all day event...cleaning, boiling water, mashing, boiling the wort, adding hops and boiling some more, sanitizing the fermenting equipment, cooling the wort, putting it in the fermenter, aerating the fermenter, adding the starter batch of yeast (which would have been another couple hours one or two nights prior), and then cleaning up all the equipment again. Perhaps some of these guys have those $5000+ brewing structures and they magically clean and sanitize themselves.