Caduseus, I totally forgot to try to tag real names with GM names, and I thought this morning Darn, I don't know if I met Caduseus, because there were a few people there I didn't get to talk to. But I know who you are now, and glad we met!
I agree, awesome experience. Had intended to steward but wound up judging and got paired with some people with loads of experience that I could learn from. With two of the judges I was paired with we were spot on, never more than 3 points apart which I though was pretty amazing, seeing how that can work, and really helped give some validity to the judging exercise for me and demonstrate that there can be consistency and consensus. With another judge we had to work a little harder to bridge the gap between what we thought of the mead a few times, but for the most part we were taking away the same things and making the same observations, just assigning different numerical values and weights to them.
All in all I think I judged 40 meads, and enjoyed a few more than that. Took home a few real crowd pleasers as parting gifts to enjoy later. And I won my first medal, Gold in Tradition - Dry!
To answer Maylar: Pro BOS winners were a wonderful strawberry mead (semi/sack/still), a very smooth orange blossom with 3 different oranges (semi/standard/still), and a Chambourcin pyment (semi/sack/still)
I'll let caduseus talk about the Home BOS because he was right there taking notes and keeping track of the discussion. He was even able to remind the judges a couple times where they were with their opinions of a some meads that were discussed earlier but had to come back to. He did awesome. And it was a real battle for the judges for the top two placers.
Jeff