Amanda,
To judge how many entries?
How much was out of pocket that you had to be reimbursed from AHA? How happy were you with the reimbursement process?
Did you have to ship back the scoresheets or did the AHA handle that?
If it were 750 entries, and you didn't have to handle the shipping costs out of that then yes someone should be able to do it for that amount. The problem seems to be getting enough judge sites volunteering for the task. I know that after judging our local competition, the last thing I want to do is sit down and judge another huge competition.
One of the reasons that we're able to get our competition judged is because our own beer is in there, our friends' beer is in there, and a lot of potentially new club members' beers are in there. So the motivation is there to put on a well run competition and provide good feedback for our friends, ourselves and the local homebrewing community.
But to host an NHC 1st round site, in which none of us could get our beers entered, for brewers that aren't in our local area, after judging our own local competition, for $3 an entry.....? That's a tough sell and I, for one, wouldn't take that proposition to my club.
The AHA would have to provide some form of motivation for taking on the task of being a 1st round judge site. One cost free and logical incentive would be to allow judges the opportunity to get their beers into the NHC. Judge or steward three flights one year and you get to enter beer in the next year during an early registration period. Not only would this motivate the existing judge, it would motivate more brewers to become judges; and the lack of willing judges and judging sites seems to be the bottleneck in the NHC.
Good judge 'thank you' gifts are also appreciated by judges, and if provided by the AHA they would benefit from their scale. For example, for us to order growler coozies as judge gifts, it's several dollars each b/c we're only ordering a few dozen. For the AHA, if they ordered a few thousand, the cost would be much less.
Judge swag wouldn't do it alone though. For a club to take on the duties of judging a NHC 1st round, their beer would have to be in the competition.
Tom, thanks for the cool headed reply, it's much appreciated.
Michael,
So what is the amount per entry that is kicked down to the first round site?
Todd
According to this earlier post, the total is $2500, you do the math...
2) The AHA has approve us for something on the order of $2500 - how is this not enough to run a competition with food? I guess we'll find out, but our preliminary budget shows us with enough money for a fully catered Friday dinner, hot breakfast Saturday and hot lunch on Saturday.
I was slightly off in my memory, it's $2360. I was $140 high.