Competition in Tennessee

by Bryan Gros

Lisa and I went to the first annual Blackhorse homebrew competition in a little town near the Kentucky border called Clarksville (home of Austin Peay University where we hear the standard cheer during football games is "Let's Go Peay!"). Anyway, they have a pretty active club up there called the Tuckassee homebrewers and they put on their first competition. It was held at the Blackhorse brewpub. They did things a bit different than we did at BABO, so here's how it went.

They took entries in all 29 AHA styles, and they got 77 total entries, which includes three by mail. The entries also seemed to cover the whole spectrum of styles rather than concentrated into a subset of styles. They split the entries into 8 categories for judging. No prelims. I'm not sure what

happened, but they didn't have sixteen judges, so I was drafted to judge and two judges did two categories. Dave Miller and Chuck Skypeck, two of the professional brewers in Nashville, were there to judge, as were several certified judges from around Tennessee.

Just to give you an idea of the categories, mine was "mixed styles". We had two bavarian wheats, two american wheats, two alt beers, two steam beers, one kolsch and two "specialty beers", which apparently weren't in the specialty category because the entrant did not indicate what was "special" about them. Lisa did the "brown ales" category, which contained scotch and scottish ales, wit beers, Belgian wheat beers and brown ales.

The judging actually went smoothly. It was done in the upstairs bar, so no kitchen odors to deal with. They had people downstairs at the bar to promote homebrewing and talk to people. Part of their promotion was to use the third bottle of each entry to pour for people interested in trying

homebrew. Of course not all of these entries were up to par.

There were also kegs by the brewers in the Clarksville club as well as a keg from a Nashville brewpub. They got a lot of donations of goodies from local shops and local breweries, so they raffled these off for free. It was a decent crowd, especially with all the free stuff. I'm surprised the brewpub let all this stuff in.

In addition, the local news crew was there for the judging. That was nice, but kind of weird given that homebrewing is technically illegal in Tennessee.

The awards were certificates for first place and some of the donated goodies--glassware, t-shirts etc. for first, second, and third in each category. Score sheets were available to entrants after the judging, which I think is one of the great things about BABO. The lack of ribbons was kinda tacky.

They didn't use this event for fundraising, however. I believe they got the brewpub to pay for everything and supply the location, but they let the brewpub keep all the entry money. I think their club works on donations and doesn't want to have to worry about a treasury.

All in all, it went really well, especially for a first contest. They were expecting more entries in the mail because a competition in Knoxville last year got about 40% mail entries, but I figured that people who saw the ad in Zymurgy may not have know where the hell Clarksville is and not bothered to send an entry into a probably small competition.

There is the annual Knoxville competition coming up in July, so Lisa and I will probably go to that. I'm pushing for a "Tennessee homebrewer of the year" kind of award, and pick the brewer with the most points between the Memphis competition, the Knoxville competition, and the probably-soon-to-be-organized Nashville competition. I've also heard about a grassroots movement to legalize

homebrewing. Things will be interesting in the next year or two!

- Bryan

grosbl@ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu

Nashville, TN