Upper Mississippi Mash Out Day 2: The Big Wrap-Up

There was just too much info to fit the UMMO into one blog post!  See the Day One entry for more info if you want it. 

Day 2 of the Mash Out began with a bleary breakfast and coffee in the hotel.  Several of my friends were hanging out there and looking much more awake and bright-eyed than I felt.  Over a lively discussion of all things beer, and more coffee, I started to feel like a member of the human race once more.  A brisk walk to Grumpy's and we were ready to start judging beers at 9 AM again.

This day I judged Belgian Dubbels and Dark Strongs for breakfast.  Lots of booze to these, but the flavors were pretty good for this early in the morning.  At least one I tried would have been fantastic with pancakes.  This particular grouping had three tables of judges to share 29 beers, then they found five or six more that weren't on the sheet.  When judging beers and trying to not get palate fatigue, (and a sore hand from all that writing,) it is best to keep it to maximum of about 6-7 beers per flight.  This would have put us at about 10-11.  Too much!  Drinking these strong beers and trying to write complete score sheets for all of them while trying not to get drunk and disorderly at 10 in the morning can be quite a chore.  Contrary to popular belief, judging is actually hard work...though it can be a fun and rewarding experience to be sure.  We managed to wrangle another team to help us with our mystery beers and get through the flight.  Then I had a large mini-bos of the best from each table to do.  By noon I was tired, but some food and an informative lecture got me going again.  The afternoon was filled with judging amber hybrid beers.  I thought these were all of very good quality, so it was a nice way to finish the judging of the two day event. 

After the final judging session is done there is some down time to deal with.  During this time there is a lot of set-up for the award banquet and silent auction, as well as getting all score sheets and medals organized.  Meanwhile behind closed doors the second beer from each of the first place winning beers, meads and ciders are cracked and tasted head to head, looking for the absolute best in each category.  This is incredibly tough since comparing a great cream ale to a great Imperial stout can be like comparing apples to oranges.  Often there is a lot of deliberation in this large of a competition.  There are special hand turned wooden mugs for the winner of each Best Of Show (beers, meads and ciders.)  Someday....

I hung out with Jeff quite a bit during this time, heading over to Pour Decisions Brewery, and then Ward 6 for more beer and some food.  More on those in future episodes... When we had eaten our fill and were still ahead of schedule, we ended up hanging out in a large Supermercado and stocking up on chili peppers, nopales, Mexican cokes made with real sugar, hot sauces and questionable salsas.  We might have received some odd looks as the only gringos in the store, but everyone was very nice.   Finally we returned to the scene of the crime and things were ready to get rolling.

During the banquet and award ceremony there are several things going on simultaneously, and I do not envy those who are in charge of making them run smoothly.  There is a raffle for various beer glasses, shirts, hats, metal signs and more, with Orsi and Amanda handling that this year.  There is a sweet silent auction with collections of rare beers, signs, Winterfest tickets, and more.  This year they had a giant 50 pound box of bottle caps to guess a number and get rewarded with a large prize package including several bottles of Darkness.  I should probably say at this point that all the proceeds from this entire competition, other than what is needed to finance the event itself, goes to a local women's shelter.  Drinking for charity!  This year in the silent auction I won a set of Lost Abbey beers, with cool glasses and a large Leffe metal sign to hang in my garage.  I always make it a point to bid high on the silent auction--it is something I know I can win if I don't do well at the raffle or in the actual awards.  And that type of charity is very important to me as well.  Dinner this time was a great spread of Mexican dishes with some very authentic sauces and some freaking hot chicken wings.

Swag!

Once the dinner is over, there is time to get some last bids in and then the action really gets going.  They have Jeff Cotton as MC on this, and he can always be counted on to properly tease and roast nearly every winner as they come to claim their prizes.  A great guy named Ed is teased mercilessly year after year for wearing a Freddy Krueger sweater, yet still persists in wearing it to this event.  As I have spent more time with these people and have become friends with them, this is all the funnier.  With breaks for raffle drawings the winners in each category are called out.  Many of the winners are from out of state, but a good portion are present at the ceremony.  I'm always amazed how many people come from places like Seattle, Wisconsin, Colorado, Missouri and other states to both judge and enter this competition.  Some of these folks I see here every year and look forward to the next year's event just to hang out and have a beer with them.  Others are more local like my friends with the Primary Fermenters club, who are always a hoot to spend time with.  They came in force this year and saved my Jack Of All Brews peeps some seats as well.

Medals!! The Bling!!  The Swag!!  In the end this is the perceived goal of the whole event.  To win a medal amongst such strong competition and against such long odds means you have come to a point where you can play with the big kids.  So a win is huge for you as a brewer as well as brewcred for your club.  The competitive nature of this event comes out here, but really all in good fun.  This year I walked out with two third place medals and was so excited to be walking around with these things dangling off my neck.  The PF's brought it strong (Kyle Cisco I'm talking to you) and JAB took home 8 medals.  Tim Roets, our resident secret weapon won four of those, including taking home the coveted Eis-Anything special category steam-punk snowflake trophy for the second year running.  You rock Tim!  Keith Brady and Wayne Doucette also took medals for our club.  We also had several of our guys help with judging, stewarding and organizing this year (myself, Tim, Jeff, Andrew, Mike B., Eric-Bob, and Brett that I can remember.)  The more people I know at this thing the more fun it becomes--even when someone else wins, chances are I know them and am happy for them.  Unless the beat me in a category of course...

Heavy Medal!

At the end of the event this is one of the only competitions that is organized enough to hand you your winnings, medals and score sheets right there.  Those folks behind the scenes do a fantastic job and never get enough credit:  thanks to you for making this thing really work.

When it all comes down to it, beer judging and this competition in particular have come to mean a lot to me.  I take pride in meeting here every year to taste beers, give feedback, meet up with old friends and make new.  I am unquestionably excited and proud to have my beers place in the UMMO this year, and hope to increase that number next year.  Compared to my early experiments I feel good about most of the beers I put in this year, most averaging a score of mid-thirties to low forties--high praise for this group of hardcore beer experts.  I have met those goals set several years ago of becoming a judge and medaling at this biggest of competitions.  When it comes down to it though, I am more excited about having discovered this group of passionate and unusual people from all walks of life.

If you haven't ever thought about entering beers in a competition, try it--it could lead you down a whole new road.  Or try stewarding or judging to improve your beer and brewing knowledge.  You might want to start smaller than the UMMO.  I suggest Byggvir's Big Beer Cup (MN Renaissance Festival Comp) as a great starting place since it is much smaller and we always try to encourage new folks to get right into judging in a very relaxed atmosphere.  If competition isn't your thing that is OK, but you owe it to yourself to at least give it a chance once or twice.

Upper Mississippi Mash Out 2013: A Homebrew Competition That Goes To 11 (Day One)

Five or six years ago I took a chance and entered a beer in my first competition.  I chose the Upper Mississippi Mash Out because I saw it advertised at my local homebrew shop, not realizing that this particular comp was the second or third largest in the country (and world really.)  My beer was singularly skewered, lambasted and spat upon with much disdain.  After the initial horror of how bad my beer must have been, I took a step back and paid attention to those wicked comments and actually learned something from them.  "Use a yeast starter."  Hmm, I've read about those, but I thought my beer was pretty good without one.  I remember one particularly verbose individual who moved to the back page of the score sheet to continue with his informative roast of my beer, filling nearly a third of that blank page--that man was Al Boyce, who I now respect as one of the best and most dedicated BJCP judges out there.  I was hurt by this process, but I took it in stride and learned from those comments.

The next year I tried it again, after making some improvements in my process, and after starting a homebrew club and getting new friends to learn from and with.  That year I thought I had a winner and decided to go to the competition and try my hand at stewarding.  I spent a whole day gophering for judges by bringing cups and bottles, helping tally score sheets, checking the math on those sheets, and setting up and tearing down all the tables, etc.  This was fun, and I met several other stewards who seemed as new to this as I was.  I looked up to several of the judges with awe having read articles by them in Brew Your Own or Zymurgy, and wanted to learn from them and soak up the knowledge it would take to become like them.  I was a bit disappointed in that aspect since they were mostly so busy and professional that they didn't have a lot of time to talk.  Oh, and my beers got slammed quite soundly again, but not quite as bad this time.  I walked away from the experience feeling that there was an entire  sub-community of homebrewers who were really into the judging and competition aspect of the hobby. I envied the camaraderie between those people and their knowledge base.  I didn't just want to steward and hand out beers, I wanted to taste them, and judge them, and learn from them.  The following year I trained myself (with help from my club mates JD, Dave and Bill) to take the BJCP exam and get in the game for real.  I tried my hand at judging at Bygvir's Big Beer Cup for the first time and also won my first medal there for a Wee Heavy.

Now for the last several years I have returned to the scene of the crime--that place and collection of people that sparked this particular drive in me to become a beer judge and become a part of this somewhat dysfunctional but amazing group of people.  The UMMO.  A shout out to the organizers and volunteers before I forget:  You folks rock!

Now that I have a forum for beer talk, and some audience, I thought I'd give a run-down of how this particular competition works.  Most comps have a similar process, but this one is tightly run and incredibly massive in scale.  The contest caps off entries at 1000, and usually fill that.  One thousand beers, each with a second bottle held in reserve in case that particular beer makes it to the final round for Best Of Show and they need another bottle to open.  That makes hauling around, labeling, chilling, and cellaring nearly 2000 beers.  That is more than most small liquor stores have in the entire building.  Mind boggling.  The festivities start early in the week with small groups of high ranked judges meeting in homes to judge some of the smaller categories.  Friday morning the big stuff starts, for the last several years in the basement of Grumpy's in Roseville.  Around 8:15 people start showing up at the Grumpy's and hauling in tons of beers, prizes, equipment, coolers, paperwork, etc.  Each table needs score sheets, cover sheets, flight summary sheets, drinking/rinse water, pencils, staplers, cups, dump buckets, and more.  This year they used compostable cups which I think is fantastic--as a group we probably went through well more than 1000 of these over the weekend.  A jockey box is set up in the corner with hospitality beers to serve through-out the next two days, because what do you do between judging beers?  Drink more beers!  I would love to bring a beer for this, but it seems to be invite only at this time.

Judging starts around 9 AM.  One can only hope to get a category that isn't too rough to drink at that time in the morning--I find that IPA or sours in the morning is a bit rough.  This year I had porters so the dark roasty character in those was pretty close to my morning coffee.  Stewards will bring beers from the cellarmaster to the table in a cued judging method aimed at getting each group of judges in that category to finish around the same time and have a similar amount of beers.  This competition is so large that many of the categories had to be split into multiple subgroups of judges (I think around 5 for IPA's!)  Once all the judges have finished the two or three most experienced judges in that category will go on to do a mini best of show showdown tasting all the top 2-3 beers from each judge group.  In IPA this was about 10 or 11 beers.  The judges will pour all the beers and do a quick taste off; getting rid of the ones with flaws quickly and then zeroing in on the top three.  Usually the ranking is fairly easy, but sometimes the judging can get a bit heated as each judge makes a case for their favorite of the set.

Lunch and dinner are provided for volunteers and helps break up the judging sessions.  There is always some down time as you wait for the mini-bos tables to finish up, especially the larger categories and meads.  There is always a lecture over lunch which is usually very educational.  This Friday was a discussion of sour beers by Steve Piatz that I really enjoyed.  The Saturday talk was by Joe Formanek on unusual brewing techniques and ingredients that also got me thinking of trying something new. 

Friday has two more judging sessions in the afternoon, which went by in a blur of hop haze for me.  IPA and Double IPA's.  After dinner Andrew and I went upstairs to carb up on some of Grumpy's amazing tater tots and have more beer of course. 

Later in the evening, once the dust has settled, they start the Piss Up.  Bad name, but good event.  This is open to the volunteers only and is a reward for helping out.  There is usually a special theme to the initial part of the event.  Two years back several of the guys brewed up clones of commercial malt liquors...blech!  Last year was about 17 beers each brewed with the same base recipe but each with a different single hop.  This year's treat was 8 or 9 different styles of beer ranging from IPA to cherry stout all fermented with the same brettanomyces yeast strain.  The differences in the flavors and fermentation characteristics in each were impressive, though not all were beers I'd want to drink much of.  The IPA was stellar with lots of pineapple to compliment the fruity hops.  After this warm up the real fun begins.  In order to take part in the big tasting you have to sign up ahead of time and bring one or two rare beers.  These are then chilled down and there is a shared tasting of an extraordinary assortment of white whale beers.  This year's was split down the middle between a ton of sour beers and a whole slew of bourbon barrel aged beers.  Stand outs for me were the Cantillon Vignerone, Baller Stout, Bruery Smoking Wood Rye, Cascade Sang Noir, and Perennial Peach Berliner Weisse.  I may have gotten the Slow Down You Are Drinking Too Fast Badge on Untappd.  This was a great way to try a bunch of these amazing beers that you only hear or read about.  After that it was off to the Country Inn Suites just down the block and not nearly enough sleep!

Next Up: UMMO Banquet and Award Ceremony