Greetings, beer lovers! Happy Friday, and yes, once (or not) again, ‘tis chingchongchinaman as your semi-friendly substitute FNBB host, with esquimaux again getting a well-deserved break from FNBB’ing this evening. If craft beer is on your holiday shopping list, then tonight’s edition is potentially up your alley. The starting point is this year’s Great American Beer Festival, or more specifically, the winners from this year’s GABF, as presented at this year’s Craft Brewer’s Conference in Colorado. You can peruse the winners’ list in 2 variations:
a) HTML version, where the list goes by category in alphabetical order
b) PDF version, where the winners are given by numerical order of the 98 (!) categories
Speaking just for myself, self the loser found the HTML version the more confusing initially, as it took me a moment to figure out the logic of the order. Your own judgment will vary, of course. The press release for this year’s GABF winners gives something for lovers of dry stats:
“GABF Competition Statistics
* 35th edition of the GABF competition
* 9,680 beers judged
* 2,192 breweries in the competition from all 50 states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico
* 170 judges
* Average number of competition beers entered in each category: 99.6
* Category with the highest number of entries: Juicy or Hazy India Pale Ale (427)
* 290 total medals awarded
* 265 medal-winning breweries”
3CM the loser thinks that the number of winners is actually 293, which doesn’t quite exactly square with the 290 medals awarded. But margin of error, and all that. One of the 293 winners is Rockwell Beer’s “Kazimierz”, a gold medal winner in the ‘Other Strong Beer’ (curious category name, that) category, as covered in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Ian Froeb here. Froeb quotes the reaction of Rockwell Beer’s head brewer, Jonathan Moxley, on getting the news:
“We were screaming. It was not expected.”
Following up on last week’s FNBB, self the loser hasn’t been to Rockwell Beer Co.’s tasting room to try this out (or has ever visited Rockwell Beer Company at all), but then their current on-line menu doesn’t mention Kazimierz anyway, although it does mention their 2019 GABF bronze medal winner, “Stand By”. Instead, the featured beer chez 3CM is something of a relatively recent STL standby, a City Life from 4 Hands Brewing Company. It’s an American-style pale ale with a hearty flavor, and is understandably very popular locally.
With that, time to turn the e-floor over to you. What beers are you sampling tonight? (For fun, if you had beer yesterday, that counts too for a story.) Anyone brewing their own?