Thought I would give an update on the RS event.
Overall, it was well ran and I had a great time. We had assigned tables that were 9 or 10 five people teams. However, there were a lot of no shows, so some people moved around and teams varied between 2 and 5.
We started by sampling GM, CR, and MW, with them telling us a little story on how these recipes were developed. After that we got to making our own versions of treated BT. This was completely free for all. I think we had about 1.5 hours to come up with ideas, vote as a team, and then present a final blend. As a heads up, that is not too much time. I personally wish I had another 20-30 minutes. I think treatments need around 30minutes to brew, and with prepping and limited number of coffee presses, this does not give much time for revisions and then resampling by the group.
Each team had to present a treatment that used 400ml of BT. All ingredients were recorded in grams. 5 teams would move on to the next round and compete against Hoarders (not sure how many move on after that round). The overall winning one (or more?) will be made as a cask for the BT party. Since it will be made and served fairly quickly you do not have to worry about extra fermentable sugars, filtering, ect.
My team placed 4th so we will be moving on. We did a Mexican Chocolate treatment with a little bit of cold brew coffee added (cinna-Monstra). I liked our recipe, and I liked how we used ingredients brought by three different team members. Only thing was there were 4 other teams who had a similar treatment as ours, so it wasn't too original.
After we presented our samples to the judges they had a huge assortment of cheese, meats, fruit, and bread. Very tasty. They also started opening some lower ABV Bruery stuff. I wish I had thought about bringing beer to share, but I didn't know what to expect seeing how there would be a **** ton of BT floating around. At the end of the day I was actually still sober (stayed until about 4:30pm).
My recipes that did not make it past my table was a chocolate orange with vanilla powder and a spotted dick dessert. The chocolate orange had a little too much orange. I used fresh zest and I feel it is so hard to gauge the potency of it until you use it. Also the cacao nibs did not come through that well, but I think this is due to the time. When I have done this in the past I have let it sit for 45-60minutes, I was only able to do 30 minutes this time. I think the spotted dick one came out amazing. It had vanilla powder, golden raisins, and lemon zest. Slightly less lemon would have been nice, and again I needed more time for the raisins to shine, but they were still noticeable. I was really happy with this and would have loved for it to be judged to see how it would have done compared to some of the others.
TL;DR : Great time! Moving on to the next round.