Beers-of-the-Year  -  All Change

Spring is normally the time when we ask you to vote for the “the best locally brewed beer you have sampled during the past twelve months”.  In an effort to make the nomination procedure for selecting beers for the Champion Beer of Britain (CBOB) and Champion Beer of Scotland (CBOS) competitions more fair and transparent, the competitions from 2009 onwards will use a new system to select the beers: and the new system starts NOW! 

The new system involves beers being chosen by a roughly 50/50 combination of Tasting Panel recommendations, and by a voting system at CAMRA Branch level.

As before, the Scottish Tasting Panels will produce their three highest scoring beers in each of the nine styles. In addition we are asking CAMRA members to vote for their favourite Scottish beer in each style (Mild, Bitter, Stout, etc.).

All other Scottish Branches will be carrying out a similar procedure.  All the Branch scores will then be totalled to produce the three highest scoring beers in each style.  A fourth beer will result from Northern Ireland voting, and the three highest scoring beers from the Tasting panels will then be added to these four to produce a maximum of seven beers in each style.

These seven beers will then be judged against each other in an individual style competition at one of the beer festivals held in Scotland during 2008.  Each festival will have a competition for a particular style; e.g. Best Bitter at Paisley, Stouts & Porters at Alloa, etc.  These competitions will produce the best (champion) Scottish/Northern Ireland region beer in each style/category.

The three Winter (W) category winners are judged in the ‘Champion Winter Beer of Scotland’ and the ‘Champion Winter Beer of Britain’ competitions. The non-Winter category winners  (Mild, Bitter, Best Bitter, Strong Bitter, Golden Ale, Speciality) are joined by the ‘Champion Winter Beer of Scotland’ in selecting the ‘Champion Beer of Scotland’.  All category winners from all regions are judged to produce the Champion Beer of Britain for each style.  Finally the ‘Champion Beer of Britain’ is selected from the nine Champion Beers.

Hopefully the explanation above is reasonably clear??  The list of eligible beers will soon be on our website and will help you to understand the new system, and enable you to fill in the voting form above.

Although the new system allows you to vote for all Scottish beers, we will still be able to award our own Beer-of-the-Year to the locally brewed beer scoring most votes in our Branch area!

 

Voting closes on 28^th February, and the result will be published in the Summer edition of our newsletter. 

 

All being well your favourite locally brewed beer will be one of at least four casks to be served at our real ale bar at the Marymas Fair in August.  We look forward to seeing you all there.