A busy weekend, with nothing remotely approaching deep thoughts. My homebrew club, the Keystone Hops held their annual competition this past saturday. I was the judge coordinator. This year was the largest in 5-6 years with 308 entries, 25 categories, and 34 judges, all of whom actually showed up, more or less on time.

In addition to herding the judges, I personally judged belgian dubbels and tripels in the morning, and american pale ales in the afternoon, with 3-4 absolutely wonderful beers out of the lot.

The only downside of the competition was that our chief organizer had not tried all the functions of the software we were using, and it was 11:30 friday night before we discovered that some crucial printing functions would not work on Windows XP or 2000, which were the only laptops we had. So, at midnight before the competition, we were transferring all the data to a very old desktop in the house, and at 2:00 AM finally finished the organizing and printing needed for the first round. The next day we hauled the desktop to the competition, and it more-or-less worked for the event.

It was an exhausting day, especially with the lack of sleep beforehand, but it went well, and we got a lot of positive comments.

Oh yeah. I took four ribbons – A first in “Foreign and Dry Stouts”, a first in “Barleywines”, a second in “Brown Ales” and a third in “Strong Scotch Ales”. Not too bad.