Competition Results Update

Well, everything is in from our second competition experience. As those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know, I have a tenuous relationship with the BJCP style guidelines at best, so for the most part I don't have much to do with competitions. As kind of a fluke, I put together a recipe for a stout trying to emulate what my original perception of the Rogue XS RIS, and came up with what turned out to be at the higher end (in gravity and IBUs) of an American Stout. We wanted to try to get some feedback on our Imperial Brown Ale again, and the fact that the prize for Best of Show was a 15 gallon stainless steel conical fermentor didn't hurt either. We decided to go ahead and enter the Brown along with the Stout I had put together, and just see what happened. You can read my original post with more details here.

We got some valuable feedback on both beers. The Stout ended up scoring a 44 out of 50 and taking first place in the style, with most of the comments being on how strongly roasty and bitter it was. One of the judges attributed this to the grain bill, while the other thought the bitterness came from the hops. I imagine it's a combination of both, since the hopping in this beer was really designed to add bitterness and accentuate the earthy flavors in the grain bill. Neither of them mentioned the smokiness that I had hoped to derive from the smoked malt I added, but it is very subtle in both the taste and aroma. As mentioned in my other post, this beer is moving on to the Master's Championship of Amateur Brewing, so I'll be sending out 3 bottles to that competition this week.

The Imperial Brown did not fare nearly as well, scoring a 29.5 out of 50 this time. In the previous competition it had scored a 33. Unlike at the National Homebrewer's Competition, we did get some valuable feedback on the beer itself, and didn't just get slammed for being out of style. Specifically we were told that there was too much alcohol heat, the malt wasn't balanced too well with the hop bitterness, and that the body may have been a little too thin. Our next step is to evaluate the beer based on this feedback, and to see if we like the beer the way it is, or if we think the suggestions will make an improvement. I imagine we'll take some of it and leave some of it, as our goal isn't to brew to style, but to brew the delicious beer that we want. The mouthfeel portion especially does seem to have merit to me, so the next time we do this batch we may try to up that a bit.

Either way, it is nice to get both recognition for something we did well, and feedback on how to improve what we did not. I considered this to be a much better experience than our first competition, and although most of our beers at this point wouldn't fit well in this kind of structure, I'll definitely be looking for ways in the future that we can get this kind of input on our beers from knowledgeable and experienced people.

- Adam