Matt Hunsworth
What happens when you take one of the most active homebrew clubs in Florida, sell out its homebrew competition, and then bring all those competition entries to one place?
You have 900 individual bottles of beer to identify, label, and store with this style siblings as quickly, efficiently, and accurately as possible.
This weekend, 10 members of Brewers Anonymous set up about a dozen tables, laid out our 128 “Beer Style Place Mats”, and dove into our annual “Bottle Sorting” event for Hot ‘N Humid 2026.
While this isn’t the most exciting news to report, if you’ve never participated in a homebrew competition bottle sort, you may find some of this process interesting. And if not interesting, maybe it will at least be something “new” to you.
The bottle sort can be broken down into 3 phases.
The first phase is the “Style Sort”.
Those 128 “Beer Style Place Mats” are used to group all the entries into this main style category.
A typical place mat sheet set looks like this:
Each bottle of beer delivered to the competition site has an attached Entry label. The Entry number on that label matches an entry printed on the placemat.
That’s the start of the process. Now on phase two, “Bottle Labeling.”
Remember those attached Entry labels we just talked about two seconds ago? It’s time for them to come off. But they will be replaced with “Bottle Labels.” Two identical labels with a completely different entry number. This switch-a-roo helps keep anonymity in the judging process. These new numbers will match the judge’s flight list on judging day.
Once this phase is done, it’s on to the final phase, “Casing.”
This can be the most challenging part of the bottle sort. This is where we move the bottles into beer cases for cold storage up until and during judging sessions.
The trickiest issue here is that a Style Category rarely has exactly 24 bottles to store. Sometimes there’s less, often there’s more. There’s also the situation where categories are combined due to low entries for those styles. Bottom line here is that though 38 cases can hold 900 entries, we NEVER are able to evenly split the entries and maximize each case capacity, so typically we need closer to 45-50 cases to properly store all our entries.
And thanks to the best homebrew club members in the world and a little bit of experience in this matter, we had more than enough properly sized and usable beer cases this year, thanks to members saving them since last season and Hot N Humid organizers saving the best boxes from the 2025 competition!
In the end, all members on hand worked nonstop for 2.5 hours, making this year’s bottle sort one of the most successful yet!
Thanks to everyone who came out to lend a hand!
And special thanks to Ivanhoe Park Lager House for letting us use their brew house to sort our entries and their walk-in cooler to store entries during the event!
This is just the beginning of the 2026 Hot N Humid event, but it is one of the most important parts of the entire process and has put us off on a fantastic start!
Next up – judging!
See you there!
Cheers!
