The Family Day long weekend appears to have a new tradition for a couple dozen beer judges and stewards these days. For the third year it has meant leaving family behind and spending the weekend holed up at a brewery judging the Alberta Beer Awards.

I thought I would offer some initial observations about this year’s competition and what it might mean for the industry. I will say upfront I am sorry no winners yet. That is embargoed until April 7 when we release them at the Awards Gala (get your tickets here). For those who don’t know, I am one of the co-founders of the competition, so I do have some significant interest in it working well.

But for now I want to discuss the judging weekend and the ensuing social media chatter around it.

First, to the weekend itself. It was a fabulous success. I want to thank Fitzsimmons Brewing in Airdrie for hosting us. They delayed their opening hours to accommodate us and were generally a fabulous host.

More to the point, we had one of the most experienced rosters of beer judges a Canadian competition has ever seen. We invited four National ranked BJCP judges from out-of-province to anchor the judging (including Best of Show) and, including myself (National Rank), co-founder Owen Kirkaldy (Master Rank) and a couple of other Alberta-based National judges, we estimate we had 20% of all the senior BJCP judges in Canada at our competition. That is some serious judging heft.

It was a big competition, much bigger than the first year. There were 400 entries from 71 breweries (there was a limit on entries per brewery). There is no question the 29 categories were competitive.

This is the third year of the competition. I had to skip last year’s judging for personal reasons but my experience, combined with talking to judges who have done all three years, is that this year had the best quality of entries yet.

I will acknowledge in the first year the judges found a number of beer that had significant brewing flaws and off-flavours. It was a bit disconcerting at the time and suggested that many of the, then, brand new breweries had not yet developed a solid quality assurance program.

So I found it heartening to find significantly more cleanly brewed beer. Yes, there were still a few beer with flaws, but I found myself frequently writing comments along the lines of “cleanly brewed but lacking…”. The concerns were stylistic or balance-related, rather than a fundamental flaw in execution. That may sound like weak broth, but I believe it is significant for an industry that went from 12 breweries to over 100 in just over five years.

And let me say very clearly something I couldn’t have honestly said a few years ago. There are dozens upon dozens of very good beer being brewed in this province. In a number of categories the selection of the top three was a challenge, and we had to leave a number of deserving beer out of the medals.

Normally I would have ended the post there. But in the days following the judging there has been a troubling social media conversation suggesting that because the Alberta Beer Awards were not open to every brewery, it was less credible.

I want to address that head on.

In the first two years of the competition, basically every brewery in the province was a member of the Alberta Small Brewers Association (ASBA), meaning the question of eligibility was a non-issue. In the past few months there have been some politics emerge, a lot of it around the appointment of Manjit Minhas, of the infamous Minhas Brewing, to the board of the organization (read here).

This appointment sparked a rather large controversy that the association has not yet solved. It led a few breweries to leave the organization and other to choose not to join.

But I have found there are many rumours going around questioning ASBA and, by extension, the credibility of the Alberta Beer Awards.

The biggest complaint is not every brewery was allowed to enter. This is true. You had to be an ASBA member to enter the competition. That said there are some inaccurate numbers floating around.

The reality is that as of the time of the judging, Alberta had 118 brewery licenses (in my database, which may be off by one or two), about 105 of which are eligible to be ASBA members (excluding breweries owned by larger beer corporations, or additional locations of the same brewery). The week before the competition 94 of those breweries were ASBA members (with an additional 16 associate members that include contract brewers and breweries-in-planning).

So, basically (by my calculations) 11 breweries were not allowed to enter. As one of the organizers of a provincial beer competition, that number concerns me. I want every legitimate brewery to be eligible to enter. But the reality is that more breweries who were eligible to enter chose not to enter (23 breweries) than the total number of breweries ineligible (11).

A competition called the Alberta Beer Awards has an obligation to represent all Alberta beer. But, like any entity (especially one where the principals are not paid, like this one), it needs organizational support. That is the tension that arose this year. We will try to fix it for next year.

In the meantime everyone cool your heels. Discussion of organizing an alternative competition, or suggestions that the results are rigged or that the judging is sub-standard (despite 4 out-of-province judges and a roster of experienced in-province judges) are without merit.

This is a new competition trying to keep pace with a rapidly growing beer industry in the province, while maintaining the highest possible quality judging standards. Patience is required.

Which brings me back to the judging weekend. It was a VERY fun weekend in Airdrie. Which is not something you can say everyday.

[Edited to correct a typo incorrectly reporting the number of breweries. There are 118, not 115.]