In the last few weeks, this blog has surpassed 400k page views. I never guessed it would be so popular.

On that high note, MeadBlog is taking a break. I'm still in to mead brewing as much as ever, but the fault really lies with Yahoo 360. The site performance and bugs are getting unbearable. For months now, they've talked about shutting the site down, while failing to work on the site at all or offer a usable alternative. All I'm waiting for at this point is an escape hatch to get all my old data and photos out. Once that happens, expect to see meadblog resurface in another form. -m

Some weeks back, I earned my first BJCP experience point, judging. It was at the Trumer Braueri in Berkeley. So what was it like?

You need to get there pretty early, around 9:00. I took BART up there, so had a very early start to the day. Some light breakfast--bagels and orange juice--was set out. By 10:00 we were seated and underway.

I had the pleasure of being on the Strong Belgian Ale flight, and was paired with an experienced judge and a non-official judge though very experienced brewer. (He went on to take best of show for one of his beers in a different category). Only later did I find out there was a mead category.

Things move along at a good clip, with only a few minutes to evaluate the aroma, color, flavor, and mouthfeel of each entry, as well as completely fill out the evaluation sheet. This particular flight had 8 or so entries, none of them Dubbels, sadly. To start off, we tasted a "calibration beer" purchased commercially.

All of our scores lined up well, usually only a point or to of difference across the three of us. Afterwards, we got to do a second flight, fruit beers, which was difficult because most of the entries did not specify what kind of fruit was used, or in a few cases, even what the base beer style was supposed to be.

After the judging, they had an amazing barbecue lunch or all the judges and assistants, with lots of different beers flowing. Probably the most interesting was the wheat wine, a high-gravity barleywine-style wheat ale. Very, very hoppy. A but much for my taste, but I was still glad to have sampled it. "Leftover" bottles not opened during the judging were made freely available, and I picked up several bottles of imperial stout of varying quality.

This weekend, I'm off to SF to judge in the Samuel Adams Long Shot regional competetion. No mead categories here. I'll let you know how it goes. -m

Somebody, anybody, go visit this question and vote for whatever answer you think is best... -m

Now open, Beer Suggest. Rate beers you like. Find out more you might like.

But they need to make it easier for non-signed-in users (like say search engine crawlers) to find things, and cover mead too... -m