"Bill Benzel" > wrote in message news:sDb0f.463
> Lew Bryson > wrote:
> : Bill, take a look at who judges these beers. Over half the judges come
> from
> : Colorado and west (Mountain state judges are always the biggest group,
> no
> : real surprise). The East Coast (New England and the mid-Atlantic region)
> : puts up about 15% of the judges (really, I have the numbers, I'm not
> : guessing). I'm NOT saying that the judges are in a conspiracy, but what
> I am
> : saying is that people gravitate towards liking what they drink on a
> steady
> : basis. Western site for the festival, Western judges drinking Western
> beers
> : (and they do, much more so than we in the East drink solely Eastern
> beers),
> : Western beers win medals. I do not think that it's any surprising
> : coincidence that Denver and Boulder together have --over the entire
> history
> : of the GABF -- won more medals than any other city. Conspiracy? No,
> : inevitable playing of the odds.
> :
>
> Of course there's no possibility that SN brewed up a small batch of
> Bigfoot just to enter at GABF, is there? Only the little brewpubs do
> that -- you know, the guys who never have the beer that won their gold
> medal when you seek them out. SN wouldn't do that now, would they?

Um...No. I doubt it. Truly. I recognize that I could be wrong. Anything
else?

> I had the opportunity to be a steward at the World Beer Cup -- got to be
> in a room with a hell of a lot of bottles from a hell of a lot of
> places. I saw and handled bottles from well known commercial breweries
> with contents representing their well known flagship brews and said
> bottles had handwritten labels on them. So, at a minimum, some special
> care in handling was taken. I can only speculate as to whether the
> contents were drawn from a "regular" batch on not.

Obviously, you already have. I'm not at all convinced by this. Old
hand-bottling habits die hard.

> Last October my vacation conincided with the release of the GABF winners
> list. We made side trips to a lot of the winners sites and asked for he
> specific beers that had won medals. If memory serves me correctly I
> think maybe 30 to 40 percent of the beers we specifically asked for were
> unavailable.

And again, I'm not sure I see what this proves. I've NEVER understood why
this "proves" that breweries make "special" batches just for GABF. All it
"proves" is that breweries DON'T simply send the beers they made in the past
three months to GABF. On the other hand, if a brewery DOES have a special
batch that turns out particularly well, they'd be fools not to put some
aside for GABF. I do know of a number of brewpubs who DO save GABF-winning
batches to serve around the holidays; is there a particular reason why they
should serve them right after GABF? It escapes me.

Just because you were disappointed with Bigfoot lately doesn't mean everyone
was. Taste is subjective, and variations in personal taste are common. No
news, I'm sure, but...

--
Lew Bryson

"GOOD or SHITE?" -- Michael Jackson, "Thriller", 1982
www.lewbryson.com