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It's not a hint directed at anybody. It's a statement of fact, that I need to scare up one more judge. Also, just giving a quick "holy crap, things are already coming together" update.
Dude, you must think I am capable of WAY more subtlety than it actually the case. :)
Posted 34 days ago.
You said hoppy beer and I'm a known hophead. 2+2=4
Posted 34 days ago.
Really, it's just that I already have judges for the malty ad balanced categories, and still need one for hoppy.
Really.
Posted 34 days ago.
I know :)
Posted 34 days ago.
I think you're going to need more than 4 judges... probably at least that many at each site, if not more.
Posted 34 days ago.
Oh, absolutely. The idea is that right now, I'm lining up a judge to run each site. Both of them have already communicated that they are working on getting local judges to help.
Posted 34 days ago.
So... sponsors. I currently have three "yes" responses for homebrewing prizes. I have one major homebrewing supplier with a a "maybe", and have reached out to a couple others. I also have feelers out with some more specialty providers.
Does anyone have suggestions of vendors that I ought to contact?
Thanks!
Posted 34 days ago.
We should put some constraints around the categories - just to clarify for the entrants. Especially for balanced... Maybe that should shift to 'Yeasty" ? Hoppy / Yeasty / Malty? Just musing...
As for vendors, the usual list I would guess... perhaps hit a few of the hardware folks like SSBrewTech, Sabco, Brew Hardware, yada yada.
I am having lunch with our local BJCP coordinator - will discuss with him. I am speculating, but we are talking Oct/Nov at this point? Probably a good idea to do a quick survey to see what comps are running then.
Posted 34 days ago.
Yep, we are looking at late October for a date. I am tentatively calling it October 25th. That way, people ought to have plenty of time to prepare, but we avoid getting into the holiday season.
I got another "yes" from a sponsor this morning. :)
Thanks for those suggestions, sir!
As for categories... I'm thinking that balanced will indeed be the hardest category to properly judge. The idea is that definite hop forward beers (IPAs, PAs, etc) should go into the Hoppy category. Definite malt forward beers (English brown, Scottish ales, Old ale, etc) should go into the Malty category. If your beer is shifted towards one of the extremes, then it belongs in Balanced.
Posted 34 days ago.
I don't understand this malty vs balanced vs hoppy segregation.
Wouldn't it make more sense to just give a list of ingredients, use the BJCP styles (even the 2015 ones to allow max creativity) and then say this set of styles gets shipped to this judge, this other one to the other, etc?Or, if you feel that it is necessary, just use the style guidelines to create like categories for the judges. that fall loosely into those categories.
Posted 34 days ago.
Sure, let's discuss it. We talked about this very early on in the thread, but it's of course worth revisiting.
The thought is this - much like the /r/homebrewing comp, it's just not feasible to have a setup for all of the BJCP styles. /r/homebrewing picks five categories and goes with that, with a small number of judging sites to handle these.
If the idea is "iron chef meets brewing" - i.e. we provide an ingredient list, brewer has to use all ingredients, brewer can pick amounts/proportions of ingredients but use nothing else save choice of yeast - then we are likely going to end up with beers that fall into a wide range of styles. It's also very likely that multiple subcategories (or even categories) will have small numbers of entries (or even a single one).
So, how do we handle that? Do we set up tons of judging sites? Do we assign multiple styles to each of our limited sites?
It's perfectly okay in a BJCP competition to fold entries up into larger categories, even those created by the comp, as long as we use published, objective guidelines to judge by.
So, my thought is to simply break them into logical areas - malty beers, hoppy beers, balanced beers. The brewer picks a BJCP style that the beer best fits, which the judges then use for objectively judging them. In this way, a fantasic pale ale can still compete favorably against a middling IPA.
I don't want to copy the /r/homebrewing thing, as I mentioned very early on - I feel like we'll just be a J.V. version of a bigger comp. One style only (aka the BrewUnited IPA Challenge) is a thought, but will appeal to a narrower set of brewers. But a "list of ingredients, go be creative", allows for so much variety - and is a bit of a challenge. I think the uniqueness will be appealing, and I think that the three overall categories gives us a way to manage it in a logical manner.
Okay, tear it apart. ;)
Posted 34 days ago.
Maybe we're arguing semantics.
It sounds like you are saying that you want to have all styles available to the entrants, but you fear that will result in a logistically impossible number of entries so you are going to create 3 broad categories, but that doesn't limit the number entries so I don't see how that helps you. Maybe I'm misunderstand this point.Posted 34 days ago.
Thanks for the input, I will mull it over.
I don't think that I want to limit styles beyond the limits that ingredients will already put on things (i.e. if no rye in the list, then roggenbier is out; if not wheat, then hefe and such is out).
Regardless, you bring up valid points that we will certainly need to address.
Posted 34 days ago.
My concern is that you're making it too broad. Splitting it into hoppy/balanced/malty basically means it's every style and how would you even begin to judge that? Don't worry about it being too focused, folks come up with a lot of creativity in constraints.
I think something like giving everyone the same malt bill, but allowing them to use whatever OG, hops, and yeast they want would be sufficiently scoped and pretty interesting. In that case it would be more about technique than coming up with a recipe.
Posted 34 days ago.
You'll judge it by allowing people to specify a BJCP style. We judge those according to style, so a 32 pale ale can be judged against a 34 IPA.
Posted 34 days ago.
