ZT BrewOff - Suur Sula in the making

Well, we had an idea with Tom, that we should hold a brewing workshop in ZT. So we did...

There was an official announce around four weeks before our annual conference GeekOUT.

We lined up two teams - Tallinn office vs Tartu office. I was supposed to lead the Tallinn team and Tom was supposed to lead the Tartu team.

As I have had a longer pause in brewing due to unfortunate private issue, I was really eager for this event...

The announce video:

The making

So we set a budget - 50EUR per team and were allowed to do whatever for that. Buckets and measuring equipment was supposed to come from our own stock. Due to some unforeseen circumstances Tom could not make it to Tartu at the correct time and delegated coaching Tartu team to me. So I had a win-win situation -- whatever beer would win, I am part of the winning team!
Of course you can not brew any without drinking any. And we did both - the drinking and boiling. And had quite a lot of fun with it. Team Tallinn in action:

As Tom was not able to make it to Tartu, we decided that Team Tartu will use the exact same ingredients as Team Tallinn did. So both teams used a Muntons Wheat kit, help from W43. For hops Simcoe and Citra were boiled in + some dryhopped Cascade at the end of the fermentation.

After a few weeks of fermentation in the offices we bottled the beers along with drinking a few more beers to free up bottles. In Tartu we made a small clip of our bottling line:

Big thanks to Erkki, Arnel, Neeme and Jaanika for helping clean the bottles. Some of the labels were so hard to get off! Also kudos to all other enthusiasts helping out at the offices with the other efforts. Special mentions to Kristjan, who gave Tallinn beer the care and love that made it so good and to James who made really beautiful labels.

But enough about the making. It was fun and at least two people have told that they will try it out as well. This is already serving its purpose.

Now about the results.

I named the beer "Suur Sula" - something like "the great thawing"... in translation. 

There have been two trials for the beers. First one was the Estonian Homebrewers wheat event, that accidentally happened exactly at the same time where our office beers were almost ready. As a real surprise to me - we did not rate to the bottom, being the only kit-beer. But it was quite sure, that the beer was not mature enough. This happened 8 days after bottling and it was really true.

Yesterday (2015-06-11) we had the GeekOUT conference party, where an international jury from speakers and some random folks from the crowd rated our beers. Two of the homebrews were lined up with RebelAles brewed by Lehe brewery.


And the results were unexpected once again. Blind tasting by an international jury concluded that...

1st place went to Tallinn officebrew
2nd place went to RebelAle green
3rd place went to RebelAle black
Second best officebrew was Tartu one.

By the request of our jury members I also added the beers to Untappd - links above.

The perfect image to conclude this post is from the awarding ceremony: