Washington beer awards '15

1. Again folks, it's Elliott
2. Fremont Summer Ale is a Belgo-American & International Ale?
3. Bootjack is an American-Style Strong Pale Ale?
4. Excited to see that Wanderale won a bronze, as I just picked one up yesterday
5. Still need to try Dark Star

Congrats to all the winners, looks like we have great beer all over this fine state. Would be fun to see an accompanying map for this list.

 

A good looking list. Might be interesting to do a comparison of how the awards over the last couple of years match up with the "Best of WA" list here on BA. Been thinking about looking at that for PA, but I haven't found any state awards results yet and think we probably don't have something equivalent to the WA awards.

 

I hadn't even heard of most of the beers on this list, I suspect some or many are one-offs, draft only, etc. So there probably isn't a whole lot of overlap between what you see there and the BA "best of." I don't know a lot (anything) about how breweries decide which beers to enter, under what categories etc. but I kind of look at these awards as a "snapshot in time" of what a random sampling of breweries chose to enter given the various parameters framing the competition. Hold the competition a month earlier or later and you probably get very different results.

 

Good thought! I'll see what I can find.

 

I suspect there's a lot in what you say, but on the other hand if I'm a brewer who wants to win and develop sales I'd both put my best foot forward and make an effort to keep the winning beer on the market.

BTW, there's actually some results out there in the wine competitions that suggest that different beers might win on different occasions, as you suggest. But it also seems to result from the top categories actually containing lots of good stuff, so there's a filter that keeps beers out of the final competition but then effectively who gets medals from the final subset appears to be pretty much random... (Assuming that they use standard judging procedures similar to those at the GABF, etc.)

 

Good job Puyallup River! Love their fruited saisons.

 

River City is in Spokane. They're actually the old Coeur d'Alene Brewing Co, and are about a 10 minute walk from where I live. Never heard of any of those others.

 

Hell, you can put me down as ISO that BB stout! It's been a looong time since I've had it, but I really dug the Imperial Oatmeal Stout back in the dark ages when bottles of BB actually made it to Spokane. I expect a BA version would be awesome.

 

I'm a little intrigued by Standard Brewing, as I see they do an Alt, a style I dug the hell out of in Germany years ago.

 

Have you had it yet?

 

I bet that BA Cabin Fever will be tasty as well. I actually can't remember if I've had the BB Scotch Ale or not, I'll have to check. A brett ISA? I've honestly never heard of such an animal before.

Re: Strong Arm, looking at their/his beers listed on BA, damn there's a lot listed for such a small operation!