North County Brewers Summer Beer Challenge

Once again the North County Brewers stepped up to the mark to select the beers to go forward to the National Home Brew Clubs’ “Summer Beer Competition”

Summer Beers are also called “Lawn Mower Beers”. Why? Because as they are low in alcohol you can drink them all afternoon while mowing the lawn and still have all your toes and fingers at the end of the day!

So the night arrived. There were six competitors with seven beers to taste. The criteria: brew a summer beer of less than 4% abv.

Renier (aka Ratsathome) was not entering so he pulled the short straw and was asked to be steward.

Note to members: Always enter a beer that way you get to taste the beers without the hassle of being the steward/decanter/time-keeper/scorer/fight referee (you get my drift).

The entries were as follows ( in no particular order):

Brian_C: Ordinary Bitter
Jacob_1: Pale Ale
Will_D: Light Hefe Weissen
RitchieH: Brown pale Ale
Jacob_2: Another Pale Ale
ColMac: Golden Ale
Partridge_9: Hefe Weissen

Renier acted as the steward, entered the details, randomised the running order, decanted the beers and presented beers to the members. We were using the Capital Brewers reduced BJCP style score sheet.

It soon became obvious that as we didn’t know the style it was difficult to strictly apply the BJCP approach. However we could still use the sub-categories as a subjective system.

Thus it was we drank our way throught the seven beers. After the initial silence while the beers were being tasted and the sheets were marked up there were naturally comments like “Wow – this is good”, “Numbers 2, 3, and 5 are very good”.

Imagine our surprise when the results were announced that “didn’t quite” agree with the inline comments. After a few mathematical loops and hoops we eventually arrived at the results:

Jacob_1: 248 Points
Will_D: 232 Points
Ritchie_H: 229 Points

So a great evening was had by all! All the beers were to our normal NCB “Very High Standard”. Thanks to all for the effort.

A special big thanks to Renier for his stewarding!

Here’s to the next meet/comp.

Will