I'm sure that this is the question that we all want answered. After all we can easily imagine a scenario where once entered GK IPA wins Best Bitter and comes second overall in the Champion Beer of Britain competition. A ringer cask of 'special' brew; bribery and corruption; nobbling the opposition; mass hysteria and hallucinations among the tasting panels; or just a set of judges who really, really love hop oil.
It could happen. But how on earth did GK IPA get in there in the first place? I think that I now have part of the answer.
Although I am a life member of CAMRA, and spent more years than I would care to mention as one of the main organisers of a very major CAMRA beer festival, I was always a bit sketchy about how beers were entered for consideration as possible Champion Beer of Britain.
I thought that it had to do with winning Beer of the Festival at local CAMRA beer festivals in the preceding year, together with nominations sent in by members once a year.
I have myself photo-copied the form in What's Brewing and posted off my selection to HQ many times. I've also fretted over the fact that our beer festival usually couldn't agree on a method to select a beer of the festival, and so didn't have one. I always thought that we were missing out on putting forward a beer into the CBoB process. I needn't have worried.
A chance meeting on the way to the match on Saturday with an old friend who is now somewhat up there in the CAMRA hierarchy has put me right on who chooses the beers. For a normal category of the CBoB of the eight beers under consideration one on average will have come from the winners of beer of the festival, one from the nominations sent in, and the other six from the CAMRA regional tasting panels.
This was something of a revelation to me. I had thought that the tasting panels mainly laboured long and hard over writing the official description for the beers in the Good Beer Guide. It hadn't ever occurred to me that these small groups of people had the major influence on what beers were entered into the CBoB competition.
So now we know how the first step towards this ridiculous and humiliating aberration occurred. The massive PR disaster of CAMRA's own 'Svengate' wasn't the fault of lots of drinkers at beer festivals up and down the country bizarrely overrating GK IPA, or of thousands of CAMRA members writing in and demanding that the king of the hop oil be considered worthy of the CBoB crown. No, it was all down to a tiny number of seriously deranged individuals on a CAMRA regional tasting panel.
To show how much damage these few people have done to the credibility of the CBoB competition, I am informed that the loud booing when the GK IPA result was announced at the GBBF came not just from bewildered ordinary real ale drinkers, but also from most of the brewers present.