FOOD & WINE: Now – a ‘Sommelier’ for beer

COMMENT: By Patrick Skinner

 

I have been a judge at a number of wine competitions including several of the Ruinart Sommelier of the Year, but last week marked something totally new for me. The distributors of the best-selling Belgian beer, Desras Trading, invited me to be one of four ‘Consumer’ Judges at the Cyprus Finals of the 2007 “Stella Artois” World Draughtmasters competition, which took place at TGI Fridays, Lemesos. We sat and acted our parts as customers and evaluated the service to us by the eight barman finalists. My fellow judges were Dr. Nearchos Rhoumbas, who was director of the government Viticulture and Viniculture in Lemesos for many years, where he was a power in laying the foundations of the modern Cyprus wine industry; Rania Kyriakides – Marketing Director, Desras Trading; and Lefteris Charalambous – Draught Technical Manager, DESRAS Trading.

Each contestant had to serve four beers: two draught Stella Artois, one draught “Hoegaarden” and one bottled beer (“Leffe”). Each barman’s service sequence was:

• Greet the customers, with chat appropriate to the day and the people, answering any questions.
• Take the order.
• Go behind the bar and prepares the various glasses for the different beers.
• Pull the draught beers into glasses, measuring the head.
• Level froth coming over top of glass.
• Ensure outside of glass is dry.
• Put glasses and three draught beers on tray, with beer mats, and dry glass for bottled beer.
• Put beer mats on table with logo facing customers.
• Serve Stella Artois and Hoegaarden draught beers, ensuring logo on the glass is facing the customer.
• Open bottled beer, and pour, leaving some in bottle.
• Leave bottle.
• Wish customers an enjoyable drink.

This is quite a complicated procedure and nerves got the better of several contestants, who mixed up the orders or did not observe the correct sequence. But the real judging was done inside bar – evaluation of the efficient washing and cleaning of the glasses, the “pulling” the beer, adjusting the froth [The “Head”], examining the filled glasses and setting the tray). Here was a real professional judge, of 30 years’ experience from Stella Artois in Belgium, Firmin Verlayen. His eagle eye was everywhere, every little step noted on his clip-board.

Winner Antonis Antoniou will fly to Leuven, Belgium, for the world finals on October 26^th. There he will do battle with bartenders, male and female (the competition has been won several times by women) from more than 120 countries.

In the past several years the Cypriot winners have come a very creditable seventh in the competition – pretty remarkable really, when you consider the size of many markets and the number of top barmen in them.

 

The Finalists were…

Winner: Antonis Antoniou from Beachcomber (245 points)

: Andreas Panayiotou – Babylon (243 points)

: Ivan Zambart – Babylon (229 points)

Antonis Fysentzos – Woodstock

Constantinos Philippou – Waterhole

Doros Karasavva – Draught Microbrewery

Panayiotis Christodoulou – TGI Fridays

Christos Yioupis – TGI Fridays