Wow, what a fun Saturday that was!
Stewarding is much better than judging, IMHO! The judges sit down and quietly go through a single flight of beers - the stewards serve up ALL the beers for all the flights and styles and collect the judging sheets after each beer. We check the sheets to make sure the judges have added up correctly (they did!) and are within 7 points of each other's score otherwise we return the sheets to resolve the contention, or call in the chief judge and steward to have a taste and make a call. That is very rare at this level...
Then, if we see that they have judged a beer highly (like they did with Ray Mills' outstanding beers - I really loved your German Pilsner, can I swap you one of my kids for the recipe
:lol: ), we put the bottle to one side as a "Stewards Sampler"!
We had over 200 beers and of that, about 180 bottles of excellent beer to finish off!
Believe it or not, we had a couple of infections - not sure who's beer they were (we just see the bottles with a sticker and a four digit code on it), so if you had an entry that was scored low, don't worry - it might have been an infected bottle rather than a bad beer brewed...
Who says competitions are boring
:chug: :chug:
Cheers,
TL (in the beer brewing premiership winning state!)
B) :chug: