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Check out our Chop N Brew promotional video here by our good friend Chip Walton
Like last year we have two specialty categories for America Wild and 100% Brett! I'm gonna throw this out there right now because I know that a lot of Wild ale brewers are anti-BJCP judging competitions and I was the same way. My Wild Ales, and 100% bretts didn't fit into any BJCP category. Well, that is why we created our specialty categories. We, the uber funk freaks of america (and the universe for that matter) are inspired by these wild beers, whether they be 100% fermented with brett, or whether there was a mixed fermentation of some kind. I personally love Brett IPA's, and Saison Bretts, and Stout Bretts, etc, as well as barrel aged beers that have souring bacteria like Pedioccocus, or lactobacillus. We are a unique band of brewers and we don't have a lot of outlets to understand how our beer compares to others. I highly encourage you to have our carefully selected BCJP judges sample your Wild beers! Make sure that you give a solid description of the base beer, whether it was aged on oak, or fruit, and whether it was fermented with bacteria. This information is considered by the judges before tasting and then they will give honest feedback on if you achieve what you were going for and if there are any off flavors. Now keep in mind, if you brewed a Lambic too-style, then compete it as a Lambic, but, if you brewed a Sour Dark Saison with Brett aged on Currants, then that would probably be best in the American Wild category. If you brewed a 100% brett fermented beer like I do quite frequently....please submit that to the 100% Brett category with a description of the base beer! Rant over.... now let's see how you're Wild shit stacks up to all the rest!
A couple of things that you should know about our competition:
- Only Beer! No cider, no mead.
- Two specialty categories (American Wild and 100% Brett)
- Half of our profits will go to the East Side Neighborhood Services to their community programs.
Our club in Minneapolis, the NBA, has been growing in numbers that are pretty exciting (85+ members). On any given month we have 30-40+ members show up to our club meetings. The last couple of months have been focused on Hops as July was our Single Hop experiment where we sampled 30 different single hop beers side by side. The wort was produced at North Gate Brewing in Mpls and then we all boiled our wort separately with our hop of choice. That was a ridiculously fun experiment and we can't wait to do it again next year. Then in August we had hop specialist (guru) Charlie Rohwer who told us that Brewers Gold is the mother of all high alpha hops and that pretty much every high alpha hop today is a derivative, or has genealogy linked to Brewers Gold! Pretty cool. Charlie looked at all of the hops we did in our tasting and talked to us about its lineage which was just a crazy amount madness because he know it all by hear, he wasn't even looking at notes.
Our club will be at the State Fair helping out in the Land of 10,000 beers station in early September. Also in late September to early October we will be emptying our Red Wine barrel aged Russian Imperial Stout and filling it back up with a Barley Wine!
Cheers!
