Alltech CBDC - Dublin, part2 - and a win

We've just arrived back in Cumbria, after a busy couple of days in Dublin, having great fun, learning stuff about beer, and Bourbon, and Whisky and other wonderful malt based beverages and of course, best of all, catching up with beery folk. It was good to have a few beers with The Beer Nut and Tale of Ale as well as many other good people. New friends were made and a few mutually beneficial ideas floated.

I want to say a whole load more about the First Alltech Craft Brewing and Distilling Conference. But, suffice to say that we really enjoyed it a lot. It was fun, hard-work, tiring, educational, commercially stimulating and friendly all rolled into one.

I think it's an event to watch out for. It's similar, in a way, to the SIBA BeerX which occurred for the first time this year. However, from a brewing point of view it was broader and more comprehensive in the technical content of the seminars. With there being an international element to the conference it is much more useful to businesses like ours who want to expand international horizons. If I had to choose between BeerX and this I'd have a difficult decision to make I feel.

Having said that, sometimes the Americanisation was a downside. I mean, one speaker actually joked about S.I. units as if they were something to be ridiculed. I know, we are all a little protective of the pint, but for goodness sake, those guys can't even get that right. No, seriously, if you are going to give a technical seminar in Europe please have the decency to convert inches into millimetres, fahrenheit into centigrade and remember that although the UK breweries do still understand barrels as a unit of volume, you still didn't get that right either. Personally I think it would be better if we all used hectolitres when describing brewery size, that way there can be no confusion.

Anyhow, we entered some beers into the Dub Cup, as it seems to have been christened. It turns out that Azimuth and Continuum were good enough to gain bronze, which is quite good considering the other world class beers that were there. The full results can be seen here, we certainly sit alongside a few other notary UK breweries as well as our Stateside and Irish counterparts.