Today was a Good Beer Day
I’ve been working on entering beers in all of the Lone Star Circuit Brewing Competition this year. I’ve already received results from the BlueBonnet Brewoff. The next in the series is the Alamo City Cerveza Fest. I initially had some trouble importing my recipes via beerXML into their competition software (which btw is Open Source, and widely used at all of the AHA competitions). So it was odd that this worked fine for the BlueBonnet Brewoff but I was having trouble with ACCF.
A short email to their contact and we settled that it wasn’t going to work but the extra information wasn’t really needed. And as usual, after the phone call, all of it started working just fine.
I submitted three entries into the competition, Big Fat Phony (my favorite category 23 beer, but I hadn’t received any results yet, so these results will be quite interesting), Kuroppoi as a 5C Dopplebock (again before I had the BlueBonnet results which suggested submitting this as a 5B Traditional Block) and since I had run out of my favorite Momosuppai Peach Berliner Weiss, I substituted in one of my latest IPAs, Oops I mixed my Grains with Calpyso and Citra hops.
After viewing the results from BlueBonnet, I really wanted to see what I had submitted for ACCF. Logging back into their competition software proved difficult. The system had said that my password (which I store in Lastpass) was incorrect and then the kicker, while attempting to reset the password I was informed that my email address wasn’t in the system. Oh boy.
After an email to the coordinator the real saga began. After about three or four days of getting assurances that the webmaster was “on it”, I get an update with new login information. I logged in to find *nothing* in the system. None of my contact info and more shocking, none of my beer entries. A short email back about this small minor detail and I get a response:
“Please call us as soon as possible about your entries”
I called 15 minutes later, on Sunday. They were blunt and to the point.
“We’ve lost your entries.”
Somehow they must have been missed at the pickup point at Austin Homebrew Supply. Or they fell off the dock at Branchline Brewing, the designated drop-off location for the ACCF. Later that night I planned my approach. I’d stop by AHS on Monday looking for the beers at the store. In case they weren’t there, ACCF had said they would still let me submit three beers, but I would need to drive them down to San Antonio.
Some good could come from this as I had other beers ready, and I could replace the Big Fat Phony, which seemed too challenging for the judges in BlueBonnet brewoff. I needed one last detail from ACCF, including where I needed to drop by beers off.
In their response, I received some grand news. They had found my beers, and they had been judged with the rest of them. It turned out there was some additional confusion and delay among the ACCF team, but at least for me, all is right now.
I’ll be waiting till April 20th, when the results will be posted. Here’s hoping for no more beer competition drama.