The Winner of the First Annual 75th Street Brewery Homebrewing Contest is . . .

Me.

There were 17 beers in the competition - most of them were really, really good. I particularly enjoyed an Orange Honey Wheat, which I think the Brewery ought to consider adding to its summer line-up, a Scottish Wee Heavy, a wonderful Schwarzbier, a great Saison and a pretty darned good Weissbier.

Everyone in the bar got to judge all the beers, and vote for only one favorite. The samples were served in 3 flights, apparently divided by strength. The first flight was lighter bodied, but it was probably the best flight in terms of serving up a bunch of very good, drinkable beers. As the intensity of the flights increased, so did the margin between the great beers and the ones that, in the words of one of the volunteer judges, tasted "more like an attempt on my life".

All but a couple of the beers, though, were excellent. Judges got to taste a whole lot of styles of beer, which is unusual for a homebrew contest, where you normally taste flights composed entirely of one type of beer. Some of the judges seemed to really take the process seriously, carefully sniffing and swirling and holding samples up to the light, while others knocked back the beers and chose the one they enjoyed the most.

I talked to the staff during the contest, and it sounds like, next year, they may change the way they do things. They talked about having the 75th Street brewers and staff taste all the submissions, and decide on a panel of 5 or so finalists for everyone to taste and vote on. That sounds like a good idea to me - they would get more submissions if every brewer did not need to submit a half case of beer just to get into the game. That way, we could just submit a couple or three bottles to start, and then submit the rest if we made it into the finals. Also, a group of 5 or so brewers would get the honor of being named finalists, instead of just one brewer getting all the honors. Finally, perhaps those of us who keg could simply bring up a keg of the finalist beer, rather than hassling with bottles and bottling equipment.

I'm not sure when, but sometime in the relatively near future, you'll be able to buy a pint of my beer at my favorite brewery in Kansas City. Cheers!