Today is the first anniversary of soyeahdood.com as a site, and like the holiday season in which this anniversary takes place, this seems like a good time for reflection.
Personally, this whole year has been a year of transitions:
- I took on some challenging freelance work and learned a lot of lessons doing it
- I survived a merger at my job
- Only to look for, and get a new job that was a substantial promotion and a LOT more responsibility
But as you might expect in the first year of a site, it’s also been a year of transitions in the life of So Yeah Dood:
- I moved the series from The Loss Column to its own site
- I took on the challenge of improving my beer knowledge with the BJCP course
- I started a homebrew club
- I improved my own brewing capabilities significantly
- I covered, and participated in the inaugural Baltimore Beer Week
- I made at least a score of new friends, and all of them through the site and the class
One can only hope that next year will surpass this one in terms of challenge and reward.
So what’s next?
In the new year, I plan to unveil a new design for the site with increased interactivity, more interviews with brewers, vintners, etc, more event posts, and the occasional contest for all you loyal readers — few as you may be.
Here’s the first contest:
As thanks for your readership, it starts today.
Details:
This contest is a recipe formulation contest. To enter, submit a beer recipe in the comments of this post. The recipe can be either extract, partial-mash, or all-grain — all will be judged by the same criteria. A good partial mash recipe would definitely outdo a so-so all-grain. There is no style requirement, but please be as detailed as you can be. Include what yeast you would use, talk about the water profile you would use, talk about when and how you would add hops, etc.
You can use BrewPal, Promash, BeerSmith, etc. to produce you recipe, but submit it via email in plain text or Word format.
I will be judging submissions based on the following criteria weighted in order from the top down:
- Creativity — I’m looking for interesting, but not necessarily weird.
- Technical merit — Be detailed enough to explain your process, whatever it might be. Think about what works, and why it works.
- Personal taste — Everyone has an opinion, and you can’t be objective about everything. Besides — this is still to some degree about subjective enjoyment. That said, this is the lower on the totem pole than the above two items.
Final submissions are due no later than 11 p.m. on January 12, 2010.
The winner gets the following:
- A commemorative pint glass printed with So Yeah Dood year one’s logo.
- Your beer will be brewed by So Yeah Dood and we’ll make sure you get to taste some whether that’s a bottle smuggled your way, or from a keg if you live local.
- If you live local to Baltimore, I’d be happy to have you join me in the brewing.
Get crackin’! I can’t wait to see what you guys submit.
And I’ll post all the recipes for readers to view once the contest ends.
I want to wish all of you out there a happy holiday — whichever one (or none) you observe.
I have barely started this, and I have already determined that this will be at least a three part post. Mashing is that big, and that important. It takes into account understandings of botany, chemistry, thermodynamics, physics, fluid motion… a lot of science. Which is actually pretty funny considering that at its core, mashing is putting hot water on crushed grain and waiting.