• POSITION STATEMENT & BIOGRAPHY OF AL BOYCE FOR THE POSITION OF BJCP NORTH REGION REPRESENTATIVE

    Although I am relatively new to "organized" brewing and the BJCP , I have been home-brewing for over 12 years, approximately 300 batches. Since joining the local clubs and the BJCP, I have had fun catching up on what I've been missing!

    I am a member of three local homebrew clubs: The Minnesota Home Brewers Association, The Saint Paul Homebrewers Club, and the Prairie Homebrewer's Companions of Fargo. I have served as a board member for the last two years on the MhBA. During that tenure, I have had the opportunity to revive the BJCP classes in our club after a two year hiatus, and the response has been so good that now our club is teaching TWO classes per year, Fall and Winter. I also organized the "Beer Good Bus Tour" for the 24 members of the above-mentioned three clubs to the AHA National Conference in Chicago in 2003. And For the third year running, I have been on the organizing committee for the Upper Mississippi Mash-Out Homebrew Competition in the Twin Cities, serving as administrator for the last two. I have also helped organize the Autumn Homebrew Review competition, and the inaugural Minnesota State Fair Homebrew Competition in 2003.

    After participating in several competitions that were run mostly on paper, and building on the digital efforts of my fellow Mash-Out organizer Steve Fletty, I wrote the BeerContestDB website. This is web-based full-service BJCP Competition organizing software, scalable to almost any size competition, and useable by any number of competitions simultaneously. We have used it in our local homebrew competitions for the last two years with great success.

    I became a Recognized BJCP Judge in September of 2000, Certified in July of 2002, and National in September of 2003. I became inspired to further my activities in the BJCP after judging in the first round of the AHA National Homebrew Competition in Chicago in 2001, and again after attending the extremely well-run Kansas City Biermeisters competition in February of 2003. My mentor in the BJCP has been Steve Piatz, my friend and long time National BJCP Member and mainstay of our homebrewing community in our area and in this region of the country. It is with his encouragement that I now offer my candidacy for this position.

    Those who know me will tell you that I am a very good organizer. I hope to be able to apply these organizational skills for the benefit of the BJCP. My particular interest is to helping streamline the data movement processes of the BJCP to allow for quicker data entry of competition and exam results into the database once it has been received. The online access to the database engineered by Gordon Strong and Russ Wigglesworth in 2002 was a significant improvement to the process, and improving the data entry process I hope will make it even more useful.

    I am looking forward to working to build the BJCP into the organization that we all know it can be. If you have ideas for how we can make the BJCP better, please feel free to contact me.


    Phil Sides' information can be downloaded in PDF form here.