Fat Heads Repeats as Brewing News Champion
It’s been quite a year for Fat Heads Brewing Company’s North Olmstead, Ohio, location. Earlier this year, its Headhunter IPA won the Great Lakes Brewing News’s National IPA Championship. And this month, its Bumbleberry Ale claimed a second Brewing News competition: the Global Warming Open for summer beers.
Like the National IPA Championship, the GWO was a head-to-head competition. Participating beers were randomly placed into the competition brackets, and judges chose the winning beers on a single-elimination basis, with the winners of the each round advancing to the next.
The other beers to advance to the GWO’s final four were Sunray Wheat (Terrapin Beer Company, Athens, Georgia); Summer Solstice (Fremont Brewing Company, Seattle); and Sch’Wheat (SweetWater Brewing Company, Atlanta).
We’ve Got a Winner!
Brewing News’s 2010 National IPA Challenge is over, and a new champion has been crowned: HeadHunter IPA, brewed by Fat Head’s Brewery & Saloon in North Olmstead (Cleveland area), Ohio.
IPA Fans: Fill Out Your Brackets!
Basketball’s March Madness is weeks away, but first-round action in Brewing News’s third annual National IPA Challenge tips off a week from this evening in Syracuse, NY.
A total of 128 IPAs are entered in the Challenge, which is a single-elimination, head-to-head competition. Elimination rounds will take place at beer festivals in February and March, and the champion IPA will be crowned at the Festival of the Suds in Atlantic City on March 20.
You can follow the action with Brewing News’s huge printable bracket sheet, which also doubles as a shopping list if you’re an IPA fan like Paul.