The annual Brewing News National IPA Championship (NIPAC) is open for brewery registration through the end of this week for its seventh year of competition. This is a fun “March Madness” style competition that pits IPAs from all over the country against each other in head-to-head matchups. If you’d like to see your favorite IPA in the lineup, let your local brewery know that they should register. There are a few Washington breweries entered already, but there is still room for more.

In addition to the NIPAC, which is limited to beers 7.5% ABV or less, the National Imperial IPA Championship (NI-IPAC) will return for its second year. NI-IPAC is open to any IPAs over 7.5% ABV.

As with past years, once the tournament lineup is complete, IPA lovers will be able to choose their winners for each round on the website. The person with the best bracket wins a case of the winning IPA!

More information from the Brewing News:

It’s time for NIPAC and NI-IPAC, the Brewing News’ hop soaked competitions! The new entry form page previews who has entered both competitions by beer name, brewery, state and ABV. (There is also a pie chart of which states the entries come from.)

This year, we hope to make this the largest NIPAC and NI-IPAC ever, so I would like to encourage you to encourage the breweries in your individual states to participate by entering their IPAs and Imperial IPAs today!

The competition is free but for the shipping and the beer, and every beer gets seen as part of the bracket and opening locker room.

It may seem like the competition is a long way off, but it will be here in no time. So far 63 IPAs have entered NIPAC and 43 IIPAs have entered NI-IPAC. We’d like to get NIPAC to 256 this year, and NI-IPAC to 128.

Entry is first come first serve; if we have enough entries, we can expand the field. But we need to know well in advance of the deadline if we are going to get that many entries. That’s why we need people enter their beers now. Here is the link, pass it on!

http://www.brewingnews.com/nipac/entryform