HOPS! represents at the BOSS Chicago Cup

A guest post from our competition guru, Michael:

The BOSS competition results are up [in PDF form here] and the club made a very strong showing, taking home 17 ribbons! These included a number of 1st place beers! Brian Keyes took first with his Dortmunder Export and Matt & Meg took 2 firsts with their American Stout and their Barleywine. Nate Baker took a1st in Spice/Herb/Vegetable, and Brian Eich took home top marks in the always difficult IPA category. Bob, Klavs, Russ & Leah, and myself all took home assorted seconds and thirds; the people mentioned above took a number of other awards as well.Having 8 brewers take home 17 ribbons completely tops our 5 club ribbons last year. If you are keeping score, HOPS! took home about 20% of the total ribbons up for grabs. Check out the scoresheets for a full breakdown of who won what: http://www.bossbeer.org/BOSS_2011Winners.pdf

A number of us went down to judge including Bob, Tom, Noel, Brian Eich, Nate Baker, Lovey, Klavs, Matt, Meg, Gary Gulley, and myself. We had a great time and the guys from BOSS continue to be the most gracious and awesome of hosts, as does the mighty Maple Tree Inn in Blue Island. We had a number of great beers during the comp and a ton of great beer at their amazing bar. The Muffuletta sandwiches were still amazing and Charlie Orr's memory was justly celebrated throughout the day. Our good friends from Iowa, Scott and Karen Schaar, came out to judge and it was nice to see them and the usual cast of BJCP characters from around Chicagoland. The multi-award-winning Rod-K even shared some homebrew secrets with us all as the beer flowed freely over lunch and afterwards.

I'd like to send a heartfelt congratulations and thank you to all the brewers who have entered, participated in club meetings, and were on the competition team this year. This was a great result and we will build on it in years to come. Back in October we set up the comp team to have members brew widely to get beers into as many categories as possible and have people brew styles they haven't brewed before. Happily this worked and we look forward to doing the same thing next year. Anyone is welcome to join in the comp team as long as they agree to try and enter at least 5 beers into BOSS, have a few of those cover empty spaces in our line-up, and bring beer to the comp team get togethers.

Most importantly, I'd like to thank everyone from the club for being such eager, engaged, and vocal homebrew connoisseurs during the meetings and especially the homebrewers' corner that Steve, Noel, and Brian run each and every month. It can be thankless organizing that but they do a great job getting everyone to focus on a beer and help our brewers get better. These sorts of successes are only made possible by drawing on the knowledge of everyone in the club, be they novices or homebrew hoarders with all the newest toys, theories, and avant-garde hops.

Thanks again to everyone. Now get brewing for Nationals, The Puget Sound Pro-Am, and The Sam Adams Longshot!

Thanks, Michael, for the summary. I'd like to also give a big thanks to Michael for leading the push to put our best brewing foot forward at the BOSS competition, and also thank the folks at BOSS for putting on a great competition (as they do every year).