Enter a Homebrewing Competition to Get Valuable Feedback on Your Beer

In this series of articles we have been talking about different ways to improve your skills outside of the brewery.

Looking for a good way to get some objective feedback on your latest brew?  Try entering it in a competition.

Obviously taste is at best somewhat subjective but the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) has done a great job of creating a framework for the evaluation of homebrewed beer styles.

Feedback from your friends will usually be tainted by your friendship – how well they like you (or don’t) – and their level of experience tasting beer.   Competition entries are judged anonymously and BJCP certified judges have all taken a pretty rigorous and through exam.

Brewin’ in Style…

There are currently 23 defined  categories and over 80 sub-categories in the BJCP recognized style guidelines.  You can read the current version here.  Each style is defined by 5 specific attributes:

1. Aroma
2. Appearance
3. Flavor
4. Mouthfeel
5. Overall Impression

Also included are some statistics for each style: approximate OG, FG, IBU, SRM and ABV (wow that’s alot of acronyms) as well as a short history for each style and a list of commercially brewed examples.

Oh, its on like Donkey Kong!

When you enter a competition, the judges will taste your beer and score it based on each of the 5 attributes.  The values are based on how well it meets the guidelines for that particular style.  Usually there are 2-3 judges tasting all of the entries (a flight) for a given style.

Each judge will complete a score sheet for each beer in the flight.  Your scores from each judge are averaged to arrive at a final score.   The beer with the highest average score wins that style category.

Feedback – Make Your Beer go to 11

Obviously its a great feeling to win in competition – but the most useful part is receiving the score sheets with feedback from each judge. In addition to the numerical scores, each section will also contain valuable tasting notes.  The notes should include lots of information – any flaws – suggestions improve the beer – and hopefully some positive comments on what you did well.

These are the actual score sheets used at the majority of competitions.  You will get 1 cover sheet (pdf) with your average score for each entry and a beer evaluation sheet (pdf) from each judge – usually 2 or 3 per entry – depending on the number of judges at the competition.

You should enter the same beer in a few competitions – get a good number of scores to find an average.

Then take the feedback from the judges and make any improvements you can.  Brew the recipe again with these changes and enter it in a few more competitions.  Over time you’ll get that recipe dialed in and then you’re on your way to brewing a world-class example!

They Said What?!

Occasionally you will get back a poorly scored sheet.  Maybe something happened to your bottles in transit – like they sat in the back of a hot truck all day.  Maybe it was a long flight and palette fatigue started to set in.  This can be a particular problem with very highly hopped or highly alcoholic styles.  Where your beer lands in the flight can have an effect on your final score as well.  Don’t take it personally or dismiss the whole system as flawed.

Each table has a different set of judges – so the changes of you getting back more than 1 bad score sheet for a given competition is pretty small.

Where its at!

There are competitions held all year long – but spring brings the AHA National Competition as well as the Longshot – the winners of which have their recipe brewed by the Boston Beer company (Samuel Adams).   The BJCP also maintains a schedule of upcoming sanctioned competitions on their site here.  You might also hear about competitions from time to time through your local homebrew store.

Next time we’ll talk about how go about entering a competition, labeling your bottles correctly and some tips to make sure they arrive safely.

The Rest of the Story

This article is part of a series on some ways to become a better brewer.  Fun, interesting, outside-the-box ways to improve your brewing .  Read the other articles in this series here.

Tagged as: beer judging, bjcp, competition, homebrewing, styles