Bruery 2016 RS/HS Allocations

They 100% know what it is in. Each team does a thing on what they made and their idea.

 

I like the video.

 

BTRV (Black Tuesday Recreational Vehicle) is insanely delicious. I didn't want to shop for beans so I just added a bit under 1/2tsp high quality vanilla extract to a full bottle and let it meld for about 3 hours.

 

That was good. They should do more like these, and less of the employees talking about beers set to jazz music

 

After playing with 2-fold extract, grounded bean paste and powder we decided that our extract was the best too, so that is definitely the way to go for shorter exposures.

Awesome event and great to finally meet you in person! This was probably one of a lifetime (or at least this year right?) opportunity to play with so many great beers so freely. Thank you Bruery for the invite and for awarding my team 2nd best in the clean beer category! So close! Maybe next year, lol. Seriously though, had great time and even learned a few things. Also, the winner of the sour blend is crazy tasty, hopefully bottles will be as good, looking forward to that one for sure.
Oh and also, love this years Wineification, so far my favorite from the 4 batches for sure.

 

Anyone catch the hoarder blending results/winners today? I had to jet out early.

 

We did an 80% SHIT + 10% Mash + 10% Black Tuesday with tahitian vanilla 2-fold extract, organic amber maple syrup and Stumptown coldbrew. That got us 2nd place. The winner, from what I heard was similar, but instead of coffee they used pineapple and cinnamon.
The winner of the sour blend was some sort of lemon meringue flavored blend. Super delicious.

 

Absolutely agree. Well organize and great beers to try. Had a blast!

 

Congrats on 2nd! Thanks for the update!

 

If there's any Hoarders in the Tasting Room tonight, I'd happily like to try the Cuvee... In the FW Barrelworks hoodie at the bar

 

Pineapple? What on earth lol. Did you get to try it?

 

The sour was my recipe. can't wait for the final bottles!

 

Not true.

As someone who has been a judge for multiple blending tournaments, I will say that it depends on the day and on the individuals in the panel. There is no universal truth like "100% anything", because the Bruery guys simply run the event confidently looser than that. The exact format and mechanics of the judging have differed slightly each time, but here's a general summary...

First, I'd say that many of the people who have done the judging (like me) do not want to know anything about the beers as they taste them. Not the blend components, not the infusion ingredients, not the group that concocted the blend. They want to taste and evaluate as blind as possible, based just on what the beer itself has to offer. This is for the most part the status quo, I would say. The primary goal (again, for most, including me, and this feels like it should be so obvious that I'm not even sure if this is worth pointing out) seems to be to find and reward the best-tasting creation. Not the cheapest, the easiest to re-create, the simplest, the most complex, or whatever, although those are all considerations that sometimes can and do come up in later discussion for a final verdict (just for discussion about *how* the Bruery guys are going to go about making an enormous batch of the winning blend, not that I've ever heard as a dealbreaker to downgrade or rule out a potential winning blend).

So each judge usually goes through and tries all of the beers individually (and not necessarily in the same order), jotting down tasting notes and impressions. Sometimes a score or rank. After developing first impressions and sort of a rough ranking system of all of the beers, things open up a bit, people start to talk, some judges try some of the beers a second and/or third time to develop final thoughts on them, and they read the blending sheets with ingredients and whatnot.

As the conversation opens up and swings towards making a final, official decision on the results, that is when (from the 3 or 4 different blending tournaments for which I was privy to the judging) things differed the most. One time, everyone in the group sat down at a roundtable together and we went one-by-one through the beers and discussed each one, generally with a "process of elimination" but to give everyone and every beer a fair shake, especially if there were not already a natural consensus of opinion about the beers. Another time, the main driving process seemed to be taking the rating sheets of all judges and tallying up the scores in a spreadsheet first, and using that to direct future conversation or decision-making, which was mostly between a select few of the main Bruery employees/brewers.

I'm really not sure how much (if at all) the final decision differed from the initial, raw score results, or if there were any "weighting" allowed for any of the beers, the individual judges' scorecards, or whatever. But generally at *all* of the blending tournaments, there have been a core group of Bruery employees who helped steer and frame the conversation, and who sort of orchestrated the proceedings. I hope I don't sound rude if I say I felt like the experience each time was somewhat of a reflection of the individuals at the helm. Patrick (and Jonas beside him) felt to me like the driving force behind the one time that there was an open, systematic roundtable discussion. Tyler, Kevin, and I think Matt were "in the lead" the one time it felt like more of a tallying of the scorecards with an "insiders only" final discussion. Pretty much all of the major and best-known Bruery employees have been around at one time or another, contributing to the judging and/or helping to organize the tournaments-- all of the people mentioned before, plus Andrew, Kyle, Alex, Elise, and I'm sure several others I'm forgetting....

At least once I've heard one of the guys from The Bruery kind of squash an entry before it even got submitted because they knew they couldn't source one of the ingredients, but I feel like that is far and away the exception and not the rule, and it was a very specific exception because the ingredient was a specific type of hop that one of the homebrewer-leaning blending participants brought in to try with a dry-hopped sour; makes sense that the Bruery guys would instantly know they can or cannot get that ingredient, and if anything it was actually a *helpful* suggestion to tell that group not to use it in their final submission. I've also heard many different suggestions at the beginnings of each new event that you shouldn't really do something *super*-basic like "Black Tuesday with vanilla beans", and there are actually rules that forbid those kinds of entries. For example, you are required to use *multiple* beers in the blend, not just one beer with infusion ingredients. I gather that these are kind of production-related restriction parameters, though, and not "quality"-related limitations-- they are not trying to restrict creativity or target a certain type of beer as the winning blend or anything like that, but instead they simply know that they have quite a diverse set of barrel stocks of all available beers, and it would be a damn shame and a crippling production loss if, say, they had to take *only* a whole shitload of BT barrels out of commission in order to create the final commercial batch of the blending tournament winner.

All-in-all, I've had the sense that the judging is done very fairly, very efficiently and incisively, and with a very open mind towards discovering new and cool possibilities hidden within the beers they make. This should come as no surprise to any fans of The Bruery, since experimentation has been their M.O. throughout their history. So I don't mean for this post to be controversial or confrontational in any way, really, just sort of a recap of some "behind the curtain" experiences that I've had over the years. Good times....

Now I have the itch to do some DIY blending and french press infusing!

 

Thank you for the clarification. It gave me something to read instead of studying for my fluid mechanics final tomorrow.

 

If anyone is curious, the final sour blend is

60% Frederick H
10% Rueuze
30% anniversary

Toasted marshmallow fluff
Lemon juice
Lemon zest
Lemon wafers

You get tons of lemon with some creaminess of the marshmallow. The nose was spot on for what you think of for lemon meringue and the wafers add a bit of crust flavor.

It's very tart with just a touch of sweetness.

 

So, it's perfect to bathe in? Awesome.

 

Wow. I want that.

 

That makes two of us!

 

That sounds great! How is Frederick H tasting? similar to Hottenroth?

 

Just saw a label for a tweaked release of Mischief for next year with citra and motueka hops. Yes, that should taste great.