My Washington State medal win was a unique journey to discovering what I won. I have no idea what beer won what medal at this point of me writing this article.
This medal is from the “Best of the Bay” homebrew competition hosted by the Bellingham Homebrewers Guild. The awards ceremony was held on August 6th, 11:00 AM PST.
The evening before the ceremony, on August 5th, I received the following email:
“Congratulations, you are receiving this email because you have medaled in Bellingham Homebrewers Guild Best of the Bay.
You are cordially invited to our awards ceremony to receive your award. The ceremony is August 6th, at Boundary Bay Brewing in Bellingham, Washington.”
This competition is the first time I’ve been notified of a win before the awards ceremony. However, I have heard of this being done in other competitions since I started pursuing a medal in every state.
I’ve sent two entries; a Witbier and a Kentucky Common. When I shipped them, I lacked confidence in either of these beers, so my curiosity peaked.
So I’ve started this article eagerly awaiting for the awards ceremony to begin so I can find out the details.
5 Hours Later
The awards ceremony ended at 4:00 PM PST. I waited a little longer to check the results of the competition online to see how I did.
After checking for the next 2 hours with no update, I contacted the host club’s Facebook page to see if there was an ETA on posting the results. They promptly and politely told me they couldn’t post the results until the next day.
The Next Day
I rechecked the competition result page the following day, and they were indeed posted.
Much to my surprise, the Kentucky Common won a medal! Even more to my surprise, it won a gold medal!
Sharing a long story very quickly, I had brewed two versions of a Kentucky Common for my homebrew club’s internal “Historical Style” beer competition. I make two 1-gallon versions of each beer for those competitions and enter the best one. This Kentucky Common was the one I did not enter in my club’s competition, but I still thought it was good enough to compete somewhere.
Ironically, I won nothing in my club;’s internal competition, yet this
“runner-up” got me a gold. Go figure!
So that’s Washington off the list! I’ve got at least three more states pending results this year, but more on that as they come, at least if any of them win.
Cheers!
Track the progress of this pursuit here, at the the 50 State Medal Tracker Page.
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