Head Kahuna Korner
------------------

Mike Hall

I've read a lot of president's columns in brewing newsletters and, while they
impressed me with their lofty prose, I often wished they would just get on with
it and tell me the news. So go grab a beer and read about what's happening in
the local beer world...

You all may remember the neophyte brewer from Santa Fe who brought a keg of
some great beer to our picnic last year after winning the Best of Show at the
ABQ Spring Thing. Bob Zamites has gotten another feather in his cap by entering
the giant Boston Beer Co. 1st Annual World Homebrewing Competition and being
one of nine (yes, NINE) finalists out of 1680 entries. He's already been to
Boston (in Dec 95) to brew up a ten barrel batch of his winning robust porter.
The BBC (aka Sam Adams) people plan to commercially produce three winners'
recipes. Ask Bob about it when you see him next.

Our last meeting was the Atom Masher Only Anything Goes Competition. We
conducted the judging using the hedonic method that Gordon, Geoff and I had
used at the wine judging at the State Fair this year. I think that it worked
well, especially for an anything goes competition. We judged 13 entries in
about an hour, which is much faster than our usual rate. An informal survey of
the participants revealed that some liked this type of judging because it was
quicker and less tedious, but some missed the detailed discussion that we have
with the "beer judging" style because they learned a lot in that situation.
We'll continue to have only three judging meetings a year -- a dark beer
competition (beer judging style), a light beer competition (beer judging
style), and an anything goes competition (hedonic judging style) -- unless you
tell us different. At this competition John Phillips won his second Atom Masher
Only Comp with a wonderfully hoppy amber ale. Way to go John!

Gordon, Sandy and I went up to Denver in January to judge at the Ambrosia
Adventure Mead Competition. We judged some interesting meads (better than in
years past), including a parsnip mead (nicely done, but a bad idea, IMO) and a
rauch braggot, made with smoked malt. Gordon and I judged on the Best-of-Show
round, where the three best meads were a show mead, a lime melomel and the
smoked braggot I mentioned earlier (my favorite for second place). The panel
unanimously decided on the show mead, brewed by Morgan Wolf of Denver, for the
Best-of-Show position. She was present at the judging, and we found out that
she had used some unorthodox techniques in the making of this mead: she used
Fleischman's bread yeast and she freezes her meads in PET bottles, then thaws
them out and filters with a wine filter. Strange, but you can't argue with
success. The show mead that she brewed was excellent. We all tried to encourage
her to write an article about the mead for _Inside Mead_. As far as I know,
Gordon was the only Atom Masher that entered the competition, but he
represented us well by getting third place in the braggot category.

Speaking of _Inside Mead_, the journal of the American Mead Association, I had
an article on mead judging in the January 96 issue. I gave out copies of it at
the last AM meeting. It's available on...

Our new web site! Bryan Bennett talked with the guys that maintain a
homebrewing-related site at alpha.rollanet.org, and they gave our club a free
home page account. You can check it out at: http://alpha.rollanet.org/~tamhc.
"tamhc" stands for "The Atom Mashers Homebrew Club", if that will help you
remember. I set up the current site and I'm maintaining it, but you should send
comments, suggestions, input and gripes to am_webmaster@galt.c3.lanl.gov.

There's also news about new brewpubs in the state of New Mexico, but I'll let
that wait for my next column (grab a _SouthWest Brewing News_ if you can't wait
until then).