I haven’t had time to write up my day at the Sainsbury’s Great British Beer Hunt 2012 Grand Final yesterday and now it’s the weekend and I have two young kids, so it’ll have to wait until next week. In the mean time, here’s the results:
Winner
Bateman’s Mocha
Runner-up
J.W. Lees Manchester Star Ale
Congratulation to them, not the result I was expecting, but I did say that I thought the judges would have different palates to mine. Here’s a few photos I took during the event:
Strange – the Bateman’s had a split personnality in my view – nice chocolate but with that horrible sickly Bateman’s characteristic sweet background. Yeuch. But somebody obviously liked it.
I’m happier with the Manchester Star ale – now McEwans Champion has a worthy (and better) competitor.
Question. Does this mean the average Sainsbury’s beer drinker prefers dark beers? Or perhaps they just went for the highest ABV beers? In that case why didn’t they pick the double Espresso? I’ll get my coat…
The public choose the finalists and the grand finalists, then it’s up to a panel of judges; they are a diverse bunch of industry types, publicans, brewers, journalists, bloggers etc. So I don’t think you can level it all at the Sainsbury’s customer and if you look at the break down then it was pretty even between lighter colour and darker coloured beers…
Not so much beer in the Double Espresso 33cl , The winners had 50cl
What were the final 10 please?
The ten finalist were:
Having gone out of my way to buy another couple of bottles of each, I obviously enjoyed both the winners, although I thought Screech Owl was probably my favourite. Red Baboons was nice as well. Probably just biased towards Nottingham brewers….
Last year, my local Sainsbury had all ten finalists. This year – nothing, not even a mention that the contest was happening. I know formula English beers don’t really sell well but there’s always an interest in proper flavoursome ale. Shame – and I won’t be buying the Batemans – too much of an acquired taste for a winner (imho).