September: The Sorters
By van, by FedEx, by UPS, floating in water-logged coolers, the competition beers arrive at the Anheuser-Busch warehouse in Denver, which donates a large, constantly chilled space for the entries. Imagine that a given brewery will have sent its samples of every style—six 12-ounce bottles or four larger bottles of each—lovingly packed in one or more containers. Nearly 3,000 beers—make that around 15,000 individual bottles—have to be unwrapped, checked against the registration information, and organized in a sequence that can be pulled effortlessly into the five judging sessions. This is the task of the sorting team.
Danny Williams is a contractor from Boulder, CO, who is known for the extensive collection of exotic beers he stores in a converted gold mine on his property. For the GABF, however, he leads the invisible efforts of the sorting team that Swersey credits with setting the stage for everything that follows.
Williams mobilizes teams of nocturnal volunteers, 25 or so per evening over a period of three weeks, who come to the warehouse to sort beers. Many clad in winter parkas and gloves, their job is to break down thousands of containers of beer, and reduce them to pallets that are organized by beer style, in the correct sequence for the judging.
“I tell them, there are breweries here that have been waiting all year to enter this beer and we have to make sure it get judged,” Williams explains.
The teams separate the entries by GABF category, then use color-coded dots on the tops of all the bottles, so each entry can be tracked later. “This year we have 76 categories,” says Williams. “Take category 48, the first box is 48-01, and on the 24 bottles in that case, there will be stickers of in four different colors. In theory, when I get done, and category 48 is American-style IPA, if someone wants to know where a particular entry is, I can tell you that’s in 12th box and it’s got blue dots on the bottle cap.”
By the end of the sorting process, William and his team have pallets numbered one through 76, ready for delivery to the Marriott hotel where the judging takes place. “On our final night, I’ll start doing session one first, calling out category numbers and the volunteers will collect those beers and palletize them. We’ll wrap them real neatly, and end up with two or two and a half pallets per session. Then we load them in reverse order into the refrigerated trailers, which go to the bottom of the hotel.”
Williams knows the brewers well. “Brewers call me and ask ‘Is my beer there yet?’ And I have to say ‘I have no idea.’ When I start off, I just see rows and rows off different shaped boxes of beer. And we have to take it from that to uniform boxes of beer in the right order for the competition.”
The Staff
Kristine Latham is involved in Denver’s extensive homebrewing community, and taps into this fraternity for a dedicated group of volunteers whose job it is to make sure the right beer reaches the right table of judges—in perfect condition. This cohort operates out of the staging room. “The judges get all the glory,” says Chris Swersey, “but the staging area is where the rubber meets the road.”
Starting with Swersey’s magic number of 19 judging tables, Latham builds the staff that will serve those judges: for every judging table, there are two stewards who answer to one table captain; every five tables report to a block captain; the four block captains—as it will be organized this year—report to a backstage team where Swersey, Williams and Latham are available to sort out problems, together with Jean Gatza, the acknowledged data guru who checks old information and inputs new.
Like the judging positions and the sorting team, there is a long waiting list for a place on the staging room staff. “I have a lot people who come back every year. A new person is buddied up with a seasoned veteran. We make sure they all have an experienced person to work with.”
The Final Week
On the Wednesday morning of festival week, before the first competition session begins, Danny Williams and his team pull the first pallet off the refrigerated trailer outside the downtown Marriott, where the judging will begin at nine.
Williams laughs that he may have done this job for too many years. “Sadly enough, I can almost pull a pallet blindfolded through these winding hallways in the back of the hotel, by the kitchen and down a little hill and around the turns to the freight elevator.”
The beer team delivers the session’s beers to the staging room, where Latham’s gang is waiting. There are 19 tables in the staging room, each corresponding to one of the tables in various nearby conference rooms where the judges work.
Before each session, the table captain and stewards gather the boxes of beer for their table. “The stewards first verify the beer is correct, they check the numbers, then they put the numbered stickers on the tasting cups,” says Latham. All clues to the identity of the beer are kept from the judges, who aren’t even allowed in the staging room.
Any discrepancies are referred back to Danny Williams. “Hopefully I can find a missing beer within a few minutes,” he says. “Knock on wood, we’ve done pretty well the last few years. I had one year I’ll never forget, there was a box that was missing, and I had to crawl all the way through the truck. I happened to reach down and pulled up the right box. Luckily I didn’t have to tear apart every single pallet.”
Once the correct beers are verified, the stewards start serving the judges, carrying trays loaded with samples. Stewards aim to get the full flight for that session in front of the judges quickly.
At the judging tables, each judge will be presented with up to 12 samples of beer, and be given about half an hour to taste, evaluate and make useful notes on the samples. Then, the judges talk. The goal is to arrive at six beers that deserve to be passed on to the second round of evaluation.
Jay Brooks, a beer writer and BJCP judge who has judged at the GABF for several years, remembers his first year: “As a rookie, I was pretty nervous during the first round. I hadn’t judged on that level before. But by the second round, you couldn’t shut me up.”
After the first round for a given style, the staging crew knows the beers that will advance to the next round. The table stewards rush into action. Beers that move up are assigned new codes to reduce any judges’ bias; fresh samples are pulled, and the next session begins.
When a style enters its third and final round of evaluation, Swersey has made sure of his judges. “By the time you get to that third round, there isn’t a slacker beer in there, especially in the largest categories. The final cut of the IPAs, for example, will be down to one table and 12 beers, and each judge will try all 12, You have to have people who really understand IPA, really care about it, really know their beer. I make sure that the guys who will be at that final round table really know their stuff.”
Pulling it all Together
Results of the judgings are fed continuously to a team led by Jean Gatza, which checks results repeatedly. Despite all the fail-safes, the rare blunder has made it through the meticulous process. Chris Swersey recalls a bizarre set of coincidences in 2005, when a judge’s transcription error led to the wrong beer receiving an award.
“One of the numbers they wrote down had a transposition: instead of being, for example, beer number 1234 , it was beer number 1243 for the bronze medal. And beer number 1243 just happened, by chance, to be a randomly assigned number in the very same category. If it had been from another category, we would have caught it immediately.”
It happened that an astute steward who had served at the relevant session days earlier approached Swersey, convinced that there had been an error. As awkward as it was to revoke a medal after the fact, the festival fessed up immediately, and put further checks into place to assure reporting accuracy.
In general, Swersey is proud of the integrity of the process. “Every bottle of beer that comes in represents a lot of heart and soul and expense for the brewer, and we want to make sure it gets its chance in the sun.”
The final session of the competition wraps up midday on Friday, with 24 hours to go before the awards ceremony on Saturday. Brewer of the Year names are sent to an engraver for overnight service. Staff and volunteers collate the comment cards that go to the brewers, and check and re-check the results. Other team members—the “randomizers”—sort the left-over beers into cases; these eclectic collections of beer are the only compensation the volunteers receive.
The seamless process the audience sees at the awards ceremony is a result of dedicated, invisible effort by people who, ultimately, do this for the love of beer. Thanks to them, the finest American brewing efforts are rewarded year after year in a process of scrupulous peer review, and beer enthusiasts across the country reap the benefits.
