Very much to my surprise, I made it to the finale yesterday in the Dutch Cup of Beer Sommeliers. And it didn’t stop there, because after one scary, but exciting, crazy and fun finale I came in second!
With the 2024 Dutch Champion being Léon Rodenburg!
Very much not to my surprise at all, and very well-deserved (which is an understatement).
He smashed it out of the park in the preliminaries and although I couldn’t see his presentation myself, I have seen him in the last two Dutch Cups ánd seen him finishing third in the World Cup of 2022, so I can safely guarantee he gave a killer presentation as well.
Together with Dennis Kort and Bas Schampers we will represent the Netherlands at the World Cup in München next year!
So I felt the need to dust off my blog section today. Obviously I couldn’t take pictures myself this time, so the pictures are by Patrick van Berkel, also a beer sommelier, Wendy Steffens and Arvid Bergström from the Dutch guild of beer sommeliers, the organisation behind the Dutch Cup.
Dutch Cup? World Cup? What?
I wrote extensively about both in several blogs:
But to recap:
In these Championships Certified International Beer Sommeliers compete for the title of best beer sommelier in the Netherlands (or world even). Like last year this year’s Cup was held at Brouwerij De Molen.
Early morning we start with three preliminary rounds, two blind tastings and one round to test your knowledge. In the first blind tasting we have to determine ten beer types by look, smell, taste and mouthfeel. Immediately after our beer knowledge is tested by 46 theoretical questions ranging from well… it can be about anything so long as it has something to do with beer. We are supposed to know anything and everything about the subject. Although some of those questions really make me feel like they expect us to be a walking encyclopedia, for which I could definitely use an external hard drive to plug-in to my brain sometimes. It is not just general knowledge, it can literally go to a molecular level. Flavours, beer-food pairings, trends, law, chemical knowledge about ingredients, flavours and brewing, worldwide knowledge about breweries, beer, beer types, prominent beer people, history, beer culture and more, you name it, we are supposed to know it. Although please stop asking to blindly recognise the brand of lager you are drinking. Even though the amount of specific beers I can recognise blindly is growing steadily, I mostly still focus on discriminating between beer types, not beer brands within a type. And that can already be quite a challenge. For example this year I made this chaosgraphic to help me with that. I was planning on making a decision tree, but it is too complex, there are too many variables to take into account to make a workable one.
Anyway, back to the Cup. Last preliminary round is the blind tasting of ten ever so lovely flavours, ranging from pineapple (yum) to the diarrhoea of a sick puppy (definitely not so yum). And no, I do not know how that tastes, but I DO know how that smells unfortunately and chances are, so do you.
The blind tastings count for 2/5th of the total points each where the theoretical knowledge is good for 1/5th. The five with the highest total go through to the finals where they have to present a beer to the judges and audience. The sneaky part is that you don’t have any knowledge about the beer beforehand, you have to come up with your presentation right there and then, although this year we got to choose from three beers instead of getting one assigned. You have ten minutes to present the beer to the jury (Dennis Kort, last year’s champion, Henri Reuchlin and Rick Kempen, both very very well-known in the beer world) and the audience. You are judged on the organoleptic description of the beer (i.e. the description of the taste, aroma and mouthfeel), your relevant knowledge related to the beer, such as information about the beer type, the beer itself and the brewery, and your beer food pairing suggestion. You also have to properly serve the beer (yeah, I need to practice that part some more) and give an engaging presentation overall.
I made it into the finale together with Léon Rodenburg who presented Gooische Bubbel, Viktor Alders, who presented Three Rules of Authentic Trappist by La Trappe, Zundert and Tynt Meadow, Tom Stellingwerf, who presented Maximus Donderstraal Tripel and Gery Uijtenhaak-Mesman, who presented Muifelbrouwerij D’n Ossekop.
I did not expect to get into the finale at all! Especially since I did worse in the beer types blind tasting than last year (I was not cranky after reading those scores, you were). But apparently I made up for that with my flavours blind tasting and theoretical knowledge. Yay me! Suffice to say, I was a bit taken by surprise, so I started my presentation in an adrenalin fueled hyperactivity mode, which was a bit unfortunate.
I managed to collect myself pretty quickly though and apparently convinced a lot of people in the audience to try and taste Witte Kerst by Jopen (But for real! It is a very tasty beer and you should really buy and try it!) Enough people even that I am now runner-up of the Dutch Cup of Beer Sommeliers 2024 and part of the Dutch team for the World Cup in 2025!
W00p w00p!
