Any international beer festival is an opportunity to show your best sorts to a wide audience, get valuable advice from a professional jury and sign contracts with representatives of trade who are willing to listen to the recommendations of experts. And how do they judge non-alcoholic varieties? And is it true that Russian beer is also able to take prizes? Consider the example of the International Beer Challenge.
About the InternationalBeerChallenge
One of the most popular tasting competitions in the world is held annually in the UK. It is conceived with the goal of rewarding and promoting the best beer from around the world and provides an excellent open platform for the expression of talented brewers.
Today, the best varieties and brands are defined in 72 categories. All in order to display the variety variety of one of the most popular drinks in the world.
The jury determines the winners during the blind tastings. These are independent experts from various fields, among them: sommeliers, brewers, importers, journalists and biophiles. Each sample is assigned a numerical code, after which an anonymous assessment is made according to taste, aroma, appearance and a number of other criteria.
In the fall of 2018, the next International Beer Challenge festival ended. Its results were summed up by the chairman of the competition Jeff Evans: “It was another fantastic year for beer and another fantastic year for the competition, which is now 22 years old. We received more beer samples from 39 countries than ever before. The full color of world brewing was presented, with a wide variety of styles.
Do you choose non-alcoholic beer too?
Non-alcoholic beer participates in the competition along with other varieties. The thing is that the production technology and the ingredients used in beer with alcohol content are almost the same. Both are prepared from water, hops, malt and yeast.
Beer is non-alcoholic as a result of using one of three technologies: evaporation, inhibition of fermentation or membrane filtration. The latter method even increases the process of creating non-alcoholic sorts by one more stage, and such a beer retains our usual taste and aroma.
