A Worty Woodstock
So that’s good. Really good. But does all this saintly do-gooding leave any time to kick back and enjoy the rewards? You better believe it.
Put two homebrewers and a few well-crafted beers together, and you’ve got a rocking party. Put 1,500 of them in a park in southern California for three days in May, doing what homebrewers do, and it’s a sublime state of bliss, a sort of worty Woodstock. The Southern California Homebrew Festival, with ever more elaborate serving displays, and ever more beer, topped off with lectures, barbecue, and even a homebrewed band, is the largest gathering of homebrewers on the planet.
The Gulf Coast Region seems to produce very competitive-minded clubs. A series of homebrew competitions that double as mini conferences in Dallas, Orlando and Houston occupy much of the year for brewers down South. These events are run with much passion and good humor. At Houston’s Dixie Cup, homebrew legend Fred Eckhardt has been cast as an alien, a bandito, a dominatrix, and this year, as a ghoul in the “Night of the Living Fred.” The boundaries get pushed with special competition categories like “The Beer That Burns Twice” (chili beers). This year, it’s “Monster Mash,” big beers made with the addition of your choice of Halloween candy to the brew.
Hundreds of homebrew competitions take place at the local, regional and national levels. The Beer Judge Certification Program qualifies and tracks judges as well as sanctions competitions. Many local competitions tie together to offer regional “best of” awards; the Gulf Coast is one such circuit. The MCAB (Master’s Championship of Amateur Brewing) awards points to individuals at sanctioned competitions, then brings the best of the best together for a final gun down. Beer and Sweat, the world’s largest keg-only homebrew competition, rocks Cincinnati in August with about 130 entries.
The American Homebrew Association National Competition is the biggest of all—3,000 beers, fed into a number of regional first-round sites, and culminating in June at the AHA National Conference where the finalists are chosen and crowned.
Competitions are the surest way to hone your brewing skills. The ruthless honesty of a blind judging gives you feedback that your pals never will. You improve or else.
Homebrewers do more than homebrew; they’re in the vanguard of promoting interest in quality commercial beer. The most active Washington, DC-area club, the Brewers United for Real Potables (BURP), hosts a specialized beer conference called “The Spirit of Belgium” on a roughly every other year basis. My own club, the Chicago Beer Society—a beer appreciation club run mostly by homebrewers—helps Ray Daniels put on Real Ale Fest, the largest gathering of real ales outside of Britain, and hosts five or six other commercial beer events a year. A favorite is the Brewpub Shootout, where local brewpubs compete fiercely for best beer, best food, and best pairing.
