Friends and fellow beer enthusiasts,
Another The Dude’s Homebrew Competition is in the books, and we’ve come a little bit closer to our goal of eradicating blood cancers from this planet. As always, it was a wonderful time among friends, and the quality of the beer was yet again spectacular. I don’t know what the homebrewing scenes are like in other parts of the country, but I have a hard time imagining it matches up with what the talented homebrewers are doing here in WNY. Thanks to all who played a role in this year’s event and helped us raise $6,690 for Blood Cancer United!
Before getting to the results, a huge thank you must go out to some of the people that played a part in making this possible:
Jeff Ware, Andrew Zach, Madeline Mulholland, Conner Bradbury, and the entire staff at Resurgence Brewing Co, our presenting sponsor, are beyond reproach. We couldn’t ask for a more generous and welcoming host for our event. Thank you, Resurgence!
Our official beer judges — Ethan Cox, Jessie Smith, Evan Flury, Kait Prendergast, Jeff Ware, and Andrew Zach — tasted and scored all of the beers, providing thoughtful feedback to our homebrewers. What a great group of people. Thank you all!
Russ Burton once again provided an incredible soundtrack to the event and served as defacto MC. His taste in music is unmatched. Thank you, Russ!
Meg Maxwell, Ellen Notarius, and Hunter Lane graciously worked our registration table and checked guests in. Thank you!
And our homebrewers — with special recognition to the Niagara Association of Homebrewers and Sultans of Swig — generously donated 5 gallon batches of their amazing creations to the cause, making this all possible. Thank you so much to all who participated.
Speaking of, the results.
It was a Three-Peat!
The Ale Gals (Jen and Corey Dudish Hare) had finished in our top spot two years running, and now they’ve got a three-peat. With their beer “Fiamma Dorata,” a wheat beer with a delicious zip, earning 118.5 points, they took first place for the third year running. For their victory, they’ll get to brew a barrel of their winning beer with the Resurgence staff!
Finishing in 2nd Place with 104.5 points were Jim Krell and Mike Spong with their beer “Mango Tango,” a saison.
And our third place finishers were Brian and Lori Meyer, whose Hazy IPA “Worth the Squeeze” earned 99.5 points in the competition.
We also need to recognize the winners of our Judges’ Panel Best in Show, earning the praise of our distinguished panel:
- “Insert Lebowski Pun #1,” an English IPA by Jesse Kiser and Adam Millar
- “Blow on the Toes!”, an Eisbock by Mark Zambron
- “Worth the Squeeze,” the aforementioned Hazy IPA by Brian and Lori Meyer
Congratulations to our winners, and be sure to check out our official results here.
A Clarification
For those of you who were at the event, you may recall us announcing a different winner at the end of our competition. After the conclusion of our event, we received some feedback that led to us checking the vote tallies in our online voting database.
When we checked the database, we discovered that someone had covertly taken some voting codes used to cast votes in our voting system and used them to push one team to the top of our standings. At the time of the announcements, we had no reason to suspect anything like this had happened, but after looking into it further and discovering there was malfeasance, we removed the fraudulent votes and a new winner was announced.
There are many things we’d like to say to the lowlife that thought it was funny/cool to prop up their friends’ team at a charity fundraising event, but none of them are suitable for this audience. It’s a sad reality that we actually need to consider measures to secure how we tally votes at future events, and that we have to make embarrassing corrections such as this, due to the actions of one individual.