Applications for the "European Beer Star" (EBS), a contest of the best beers in the world, has exceeded all expectations. The organizers have already received “significantly more than a thousand registrations”. Registration is still open until September, 4 and “experience has shown that a lot will still come in at the end of the registration period,” says Kilian Kittl, the new manager of the competition.
"In the 'Corona year' we had hoped for a total of a thousand entries but the thousand threshold was already exceeded at the beginning of July,” according to Kittl. Submissions come from 26 countries including USA, Canada, Brazil, China, South Korea, Taiwan and Myanmar with the majority coming from Germany and neighboring Austria which can be attributed, among other things, to the newly introduced "Austrian-Style Märzen" category.
For a long time it was not clear if the European Beer Star, could take place this year. Finally, the Association ofPrivate Breweries in Germany and the Association of Private Breweries in Bavaria who are jointly organizing the contest under the lead of the latter have decided in favor of it and invited breweries from all over the world to have their beers tested by a group of experts for “sensory qualities” and “taste” in a blind tasting session on October, 8 and 9 2020.
"Despite all the joy about the number of participants, one thing is even more important: The safety of the tasters must be guaranteed to one hundred percent," says Stefan Stang, General Manager of the Association of Private Breweries in Bavaria. He is responsible for the European Beer Star, together with Roland Demleitner, the managing director of Private Breweries Germany.
Together with their longstanding partner, the Doemens Academy located west of Munich, the organizers are developing a particularly strict hygiene concept at Doemens’ tasting site in Graefelfing. It is already largely in place, but will be completed before the start of the competition because it has to be adapted to the prevailing circumstances.
The organizers hope that they do not have to follow the example of the World Beer Cup, another prestigious beer competition, which takes place every two years and which was scheduled for this year’s Craft Brewers Conference (CBC) in March in San Diego, California. The Word Beer Cup as well as the CBC had to be cancelled on short notice due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic (inside.beer, 13.3.2020).
