Starting Up

by Bryan Gros

Ken kindly reported some of the results of the First Annual Music City Brew Off last month. I thought I'd offer some thoughts about running my first competition.

As you may have noticed, it was modeled after BABO for the most part. I liked the idea of eight categories since you know ahead of time that you need eight sets of prizes and eight sets of judges. We didn't, however, want to limit the entries to eight styles. So we created eight categories which were composed of related styles: Pale Ale, Porter, Stout, Light Lager, Dark Lager, Wheat Beer, Strong Beer, and Specialty. We kept the most popular styles so as not to limit entries, but still keep it manageable. We made one change before judging: we got three brown ales entered as specialties, so we moved them in with the Porters.

Our club is really young, but we had a lot of people willing to help out. That was a big help, but these people had no experience with what happens at a competition. We did have the support and assistance of Chuck Skypeck, the brewer at Boscos Brewery (a local brewpub) and a National Beer Judge. Boscos served as the beer collection and storage site as well as the judging and event location. Chuck handled what would have been the hardest part for me: recruiting judges. BJCP judges are few and far between down here, but it helped that four of us (including Lisa and I) recently passed the judging exam. Chuck used his connections to get several other judges from St. Louis, Atlanta, Huntsville, Knoxville, and Memphis. We ended up with fifteen BJCP judges and a few more judges from the local brewpubs including Dave Miller.

On to the entries. We got 113 entries including mail in entries from Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, and Missouri. I was really curious as to what kind of beers we'd get and what the quality would be. The biggest categories were Pale Ale, Dark Lager, and Specialty. That should have been predicted, especially since it is oktoberfest time of year. We prelimed these categories the day before the finals. The pale ale category is always a catch-all, and we got our share of poor, infected beers. But almost all beginners brew pale ales, so that may not be surprising. The judges remarked that all but one of the ten strong beers were quite good. On the other hand, Dave Miller said that most of his Dark Lagers were quite bad and out of style. But Dark Lagers are probably the hardest beers to brew. I judged stouts and none were outstanding, but most were good. I had visions of hillbillies bottling out of the bathtub, but we had a nice group of really good entries.

I learned a good bit about how to do this next year. One thing we did that looks like the Draught board is doing this year is piggyback the competition information with the newsletter. This saves a bunch of stamps. Also, we asked the entrants for a self-addresses stamped envelope, and got quite a few. This helped greatly in mailing back score sheets. In fact, we got the score sheets ready to go, along with the ribbons, on Sunday afternoon. A couple of brewers suggested we go with a sliding entry scale ($5 for first entry, $4 for 2nd, $3 for third etc.), but I don't think we lost any entries for not having this scale. Boscos provided the location, check-in and storage of entries, and lunch for the judges, which really helped out. Keeping the entries computerized a la BABO worked well, and I got many comments about how smoothly everything went.

We took three bottles and had a best of show round. Now we've got quite a few bottles left. We tried to xerox the score sheets that weren't picked up so we can go back through the entries and use the bad (and good) ones for practice judging at meetings. I think that will work out well for us. Mostly just having experienced stewards and assistant organizers will help next year's competition be even better.