Hi everyone,
Thanks for entering the 2011 National Homebrew Competition, and thanks also for your patience. I know it isn't easy to wait for your competition results, and it's even harder when you don't know why it takes so long. For future reference, this is why it takes so long for the score sheets and prizes to be sent out after the Awards Ceremony at AHA's National Homebrewers Conference. This year we had 790 entries from 457 homebrewers competing in the NHC Final Round.
- * The truck with all of the prizes, medals, score sheets and all of the equipment takes a week to return to Boulder.
- * During that time, the NHC Director edits and prints letters to the winners (75 this year), press releases for the winners (88), and labels (75).
- * It takes ~1 day to unload and un-box all of the prizes from the pallets, plus set up the medals for the mailing.
- * It takes ~2 days with 3 people working on it to box everything up to be shipped.
Once the prizes are shipped, the rest of the score sheets need to be mailed out. In order to do that, the following has to happen.
- * The NHC Director edits and prints letters to the entrants and mailing labels. There were 382 of these this year.
- * It takes 2 to 3 days with 2 people working on it to collate and mail everything.
- * It takes ~2 days for all of the envelopes to be weighed and metered with the correct postage.
I apologize for the additional delay in this year's mailing (2 weeks) due to a second business trip and illness. I know it isn't easy to wait for your score sheets. For next year I will add a time line for the competition to the NHC Rules & Regulations to give everyone an idea of what and when to expect all of the different milestones of the competition to occur. Hopefully that will help with anxieties around the posting of the First Round Results and the First and Final Round mailings, etc.
Thanks again for participating in the 2011 NHC! Happy brewing!
Cheers,
Janis