The Canadian Brewing Awards

Yesterday was quite an eye opener for me. I helped run the 2007 Canadian Brewing Awards hosted by TAPS media at the Duchess Pub in Markham and I was delighted to see the number of enteries made by the breweries across this country.

The day started out at 8:30am carrying boxes upon boxes of packaged beer from 231 different national, regional and craft breweries in 21 different categories. Putting them into the fridge in order with their corresponding order was quite a task and took a good 2 hours. The bottles and cans were each given a number to represent the category they were entering in and the brewery they were from. For example, Fin Du Monde from Unibroue may have had the number 10-43-1 labelled on the bottle and that was matched to a judging sheet for the judges.

My job was to take out the corresponding bottles/cans when their respective categories were ready to be judged and pour them into the small wine glasses. I managed to drop only one glass, so needless to say the day went smooth for me.

Around 10:30am the judges started to arrive. Other awards have been cast in a negative light for using people in the media to judge or semi-celebrities. TAPS brought in 8 certified judges from all over Canada to sit at the tables to smell, swirl, taste and judge. It was very fascinating listening to the judges at different tables discuss the beers they were sampling. These men were all very knowledgable and some could even guess which brewery the beer came from even though it was in a unmarked glass.

The judging wrapped up around 7:30 and all the paper work was submitted to the statistican to be entered today. Stay tuned for the results.