Barlow Brewing

At the end of each year (2009 and 2010), I go through the stats of my homebrewing adventures and try to identify some trends and larger takeaways. I brew a modest amount of beer each year, and usually set a goal of making 60 gallons, which only equates to brewing a 5 gallon batch each month. That goal, many years ago, was bold and reaching. Nowadays, it is a pretty low bar, but it keeps me on track.

Looking back at 2011, four trends define that brewing year: hiatuses, organic beers, the lack of sours, and some competition success.

The Hiatus(es)

I go in waves with homebrewing. If it was my job, I’d be happy to brew, cellar, or package every day. But as a hobby that needs to be squeezed into the cracks and spaces between family, work and daily life, there have to be breaks. I took three hiatuses this year and did not brew at all during the months of March, August, October and November.

I do not know if that model is more beneficial to my overall zeal for the hobby, or if I’m better off keeping to a steady schedule. I know that feel a bit more excited about a brewday after some time off, but I also feel sloppy and out of practice when I do brew, as well.

Organic Beers

Organic beers just kinda happened this year. After planning to experiment with Rakau hops, which were organic, I decided to go ahead and make that entire beer organic. Then, I was in the Bison/New Brew Thursday competition, which required that I brew an organic beer, too. And then, in retrospect, my cider, perry, and mead were organic creations, as well.

I’m repeating myself here, but I couldn’t detect the difference between a normal and an organic beer. The bottom line with organic, from a creative perspective, is that you reduce the number of ingredients you can work with to make a beer. I like the idea of organic brews but, for the foreseeable future, that will always be secondary to my desire to use the exact hops, malts and other ingredients I want to use to make the beer that I want to drink.

But my awareness has changed and I no longer think, if I ever did, that organic beers are inferior. And that is something in and of itself.

Sours

This one actually surprised me and freaked me out a little. Although I bottled, added dregs to, and won medals for sours, I only brewed 5 gallons of sour beer last year. Since it can literally take years for a sour ale to fully develop and become drinkable, this was huge hit to my pipeline.

Although I still have plenty of bottles of my fruit lambics and a few of my Flanders Reds, I quickly realized that the weekly work of maintaining brett and sour beers was important, and they can make you forget that you having nothing in the pipeline.

After that epiphany, I immediately brewed a Berliner weisse that I hope might be turning the corner by the time the weather gets warm.  But I’m screwed for sours for most of 2012. Perhaps that is a mark against the hiatus model, which would have had me, at least, making filler beers in the in-between months.

Crap.

Competitions

This was a good year for me for BJCP and other competitions.

My goal for 2010 was to try to get a beer into the final round of the National Homebrew, and I squeaked in a beer and a cider. For 2011, I was hoping that I could get a beer or two into the final round again, and perhaps get one of those to medal.

Fortunately, I had three beers make it to the final round of the NHC: my “Tobias Fünke” Flanders red, my “Fargin Eishole” eisbock, and “Slow Motion Walter, Fire Engine Guy”, which was an oak-agerd, smoked Baltic porter.

I thought my flanders red, which had gotten a 1^st place ribbon in the first round of the NHC, had a good chance, but it was my eisbock that won a bronze medal in the final round of the National Homebrew Competition. That was amazingly cool, and it proves that anything can happen in the final round.

In other BJCP competitions, I won a Gold, a Silver and a Bronze in the Dominion Cup, and two Gold and two Bronze medals in the CASK competition. Both were poor outings for me, but I’ve got no one to blame for them except the brewer of those beers. Yes, me.

Outside of BCJP competitions, my brett saison won first place in The Bruery’s Batch 300 Contest for French/Belgian ales, but it did not win a the overall competition. And I made it to the final round of the Bison/New Brew Thursday Organic Homebrew Competition, but I did not win that final round.

I also won a qualifying and the final round of the Iron Brewer competition. That was a bunch of fun, and it is always nice to have an excuse to talk shit with HopfenTreader and Simply Beer, as well as drink great and experimental beers.

2012

What will be my big trend for 2012? I’m getting a late start on planning that one out. Obviously brewing a bunch of sours, and I’d like to make a few full-flavored session ales, as well. Short term, I need to look into brewing beers for this year’s National Competition, but I might be dead in the water there, too.

If you are into stats:

Weights and Measures
Gallons of Beer: 82
Gallons of Non-Beer: 14
Pounds of Grain: 172
Pounds of Hops: 3.06

Averages
Average Batch Size: 5.1
Average ABV: 6.5%
Average OG: 1.061
Average FG: 1.012
Average Pounds of Grain per Batch: 12.3
Average Ounces of Hops per Batch: 3.3

By Category
Ales: 14
Lagers: 2
Ciders: 1
Perrys: 1
Meads: 1
Sours: 1
Organic: 4 (2 beers, 1 cider, and 1 perry)

Medals and Ribbons
BJCP Competitions Entered: 3
Medals Earned: 10
National Homebrew Competition Ribbons: 3
National Homebrew Competition Medals: 1

Superlatives
Favorite Brew – Triple Lindy / Churchill Downs (bourbon barreled Triple Lindy)
Favorite Brew (Runner Up) – Aardbei (Strawberry lambic)
Worst Brew – Piper Down 1 & 2
Favorite Name – You’ll Shoot Your Rye Out
Favorite Name (Runner Up) – Up on Cripple Kriek
Biggest Trend – Organic Beer

AHA NHC Ribbons

AHA NHC Medal

This beer did not turn out to be a Bohemian Pilsner.

So, now that you’ve been warned, let’s talk about my entry for the Pilsner Urquell Master Homebrewer Competition. When the competition was announced, signing up for it was a no-brainer. Pilsner Urquell was running a contest in three cities (New York, Washington DC, and Chicago) to see which homebrewers could brew the best “Czech style” pilsner. The winner from each city would win a trip for two to Plzen to visit the Pilsner Urquell brewery, as well as attend the International Bartender Awards in Prague.

Hey. I’m a homebrewer. I’ve been meaning to brew a Bohemian Pilsner. I only live 2 hours away from Washington DC. I’m into free trips to Europe. It made all the sense in the world.

But I didn’t think this was going to be a slam dunk. I have experience making lagers and brewing for competitions, but light lagers are a different species. And I had never done a triple decoction, which is a mashing process that this style is known for. But I figured this would be a fun experiment and I could lean on my friend, and local pils and Czech beer expert, Velky Al.

The formulation of the recipe was pretty simple as this one is almost 100% pilsner malt and definitely 100% Saaz hops. For the base malt, I used the Weyerman Bohemian Pilsner Malt, which is a lower Lovibond barley with a bit more complexity than the standard German pilsner malt. To round out the malt bill, I used 12 ounces of CaraPils, to improve head retention and give the beer a bigger mouthfeel, and a few ounces of acidulated malt to lower the pH of the mash and wort.

The matter of the triple decoction was the difficult part of the brewday. I imagine triple decoction was born out of necessity back when the grains were much less modified than they are today. By pulling out the thickest part of the mash and boiling it three different times, it darkens the color of the mash, makes the wort more fermentable and gives the beer a more complex malt character. So I followed all the steps and pulled off thick portions of the mash into a little pot and boiled them to raise the larger wort up the next step temperature.

Triple Decoction: One of the step heatings

A rare sighting of Assistant Brewmaster Jasper 

I can give you a flowery passage right here that describes how wondrous the triple decoction mash process was. How it brought me closer to the origins and magic of brewing. It did. But I don’t see myself doing this again anytime soon.

Go ahead; tell me that triple decoctions do something special to the beer. Tell me that this archaic process is not just for show. I believe you. I really do. But sometimes that is not enough when I look at the limited amount of time I have to brew. But I’ll save my thoughts around triple decoctions for another post…

So how did the beer turn out? Disappointing.

The picture above was of a sample of my beer (the one on the right) that I pulled off and carbonated while the rest of the batch was still lagering. The color was on. The clarity of the beer got much better after weeks of lagering, but not to the level of a commerical example of PU.

The taste of the beer? Well, there wasn’t much taste at all, and aroma was underwhelming, as well. Honestly, professional macro-brewers would be blown away by how clean and free of flaws this beer was. It was amazing. And amazingly boring to me. Al astutely thought it was closer to a Dortmunder Export, but I’ve made those in the past and I didn’t feel that that style was a perfect fit either. Since I knew I didn’t have the time to re-brew and lager, I dry-hopped the beer with an ounce of Saaz just to give it a little something…more.

As I knew from the start, this beer isn’t in the recipe. It is in the process. I think, now having one triple decoction brew under my belt, I could do better with that process in subsequent brewings. Also, I would probably do a less dramatic diacetyl rest. Urquell has a definite diacetyl flavor, which I dislike, and keeping some of that butteriness would make it closer to cloned and maintaining a cooler temp would likely keep the final gravity a few points higher.

I did not, unsurprisingly given my tasting of the final beer, place in the final six homebrewers in the D.C. competition. But, again, I felt it was a longshot in the first place.

The event was very cool and classy, and wonderfully hosted by Smith Commons. For more information on the event there’s a press release and Tom (@LugwrenchBrew), who accompanied me to the gig, wrote a post about the Pilsner Urquell Master Homebrewer Competition, too.

It was educational, and I’m always down for a brew that throws me out of my comfort zone. And a Bohemian Pils is certainly that.

Czech Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself- (Bohemian
Pilsner)

Starting Gravity: 1.056 (4/17/11)
Secondary Gravity: 1.012 (5/18/11)
Final Gravity:  1.012 (6/24/11)
5.9% alcohol (by volume)
Apparent Attenuation: 57.8%
Real Attenuation: 47.3%

Mash (See Below)
14 lb Weyerman Bohemian Pilsner Malt
12 oz CaraPils Malt
3 oz Acidulated Malt

Boil (80 min)
1.5 oz Saaz Pellet Hops (3.9 AA) (60 min)
2.0 oz Saaz Pellet Hops (3.9 AA) (30 min)
1.0 oz Saaz Pellet Hops (3.9 AA) (10 min)
1.0 oz Saaz Pellet Hops (3.9 AA) (10 min)
1 tablet Whirlfloc (Boil – 15 min.)

½ tsp Brewer’s Choice Wyeast Nutrient Blend (Boil – 10 min.)

Primary (50º F) 2 Weeks

2 packs Wyeast 2001
Urquell Lager – Starter Made

Secondary (33º F) 6 Weeks

1.0 oz Saaz Pellet Hops (3.9 AA) (Dry Hop) (6/15/11) for 7 days

So, I decided to brew all of the BJCP styles a year or so ago.

I think it is because I like goals and challenges, but I also noticed that I had been brewing for quite a few years and there wasn’t a lot of diversity in what I was brewing. I was always trying out new and interesting styles, but it seems like every other batch was an IPA or some hoppy creation. I had the skill to brew more difficult styles and it seemed silly that I wasn’t flexing those brewing muscles.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that I had hit the halfway mark. Of the 80 styles of beer outlined by the BJCP, I had brewed 40. And, as an interesting side note, 20 of those 40 brewed styles had won BJCP competition medals. Which is a nice bonus, since I set out to simply brew these styles and it was a subjective measure (my opinion) or whether or not I had hit the style, rather than an objective one (like a BJCP sponsored competition medal) of whether or not I had been successful.

Takeaways so far?

Hoppy beers are easy – Bottom line: hops can cover up a lot of flaws in a beer. Sure, it can be difficult to get a clean, crisp, huge and complex hop aroma and flavor into a beer. But there are a lot of places to hide in an IPA. Darker ales, like porters and stouts, can be forgiving, too. This is a good thing if you are just starting out, or you’ve had a sloppy brew day.

Lagers don’t have to be hard –  Lagers are all about a big pitch and temperature control. If you can’t control the temperature of a fermenting batch or if you don’t have a huge slurry of active yeast to pitch, you really ought to rethink making a lager. Unlike the hoppy and dark beers I mentioned above, lagers have nowhere to hide flaws. You have to pitch big and control the flavors created by the yeast. Otherwise I suggest just making the style with an ale or San Fran strain instead.

Patience is the key – This makes sense for lagers, that require weeks at near freezing temperatures, and wild and sour beers, that need time for the brett and bugs to tear through the “unfermentables”. But I think we, as homebrewers, often drink our beers too young. I’ve gotten myself into the practice of letting ales ferment for a week and then sit on the yeast for another week to clean themselves up. And lagers definitely require 2 weeks of fermentation with a diacetyl rest to finish strong.

Where I think the real opportunity is it letting your beer set in the bottle or keg as few extra weeks. How many times have you tasted your beer a month in and thought, “Wow, this is awesome. It is really peaking right now.” What if you had waited a few more weeks and you ‘d of had even more of your beer at its peak? Sure, some beers, like wet hop or hefes, need to be enjoyed sooner than later, but your beers will benefit from a little age. Give them time. Show them patience.

Brew to style on the first batch – This drives me insane. If you’ve never made a doppelbock before, why are you trying to make a raspberry doppelbock? I love playing with fruits, spices, vegetables and wood, but nail down the style first. Make a saison without pepper and see what the yeast does naturally. It might be just what you wanted, and the grains of paradise you are adding to the boil are going to be excessive.

If you cannot help but fuck with your beers, split the batch. Treat one half to a traditional process and add whatever batshit stuff you want to the other, but make sure you have a control or you’ll never learn how did, as well as what went right and wrong.

Don’t like a style? Homebrew your own! – I know this sounds crazy, but making a particular style has been the key to me enjoying that type of beer. I’d never enjoyed a fruit or a smoked beer until I made one of my own. It is not that I did it better than others, but you are more forgiving with your own beers. You understand the aroma, mouthfeel and flavors that define the style. It clicks in your head. Well, at least it does in mine.

What will the next 40 styles be like? – Well, they will be the beers I’ve avoided or didn’t have the ability to do before. In the case of the Light Lager category, a little bit of both. I’ve got most of the Scottish and British styles to brew through, as well.

There are lots of malty and lager beers in my future. I’m looking forward to the challenge.

The score sheets from the 1^st round of the 2011 AHA National Homebrew Competition (NHC) came out last week. It is cool win ribbons and medals, but the feedback is the most part of entering these contests. And, with a competition like the national one, it is really, really hard to place without making a spectacular beer, so it is a good idea to keep your expectations low.

My sheets came back from the Nashville region and quality of the feedback and the scores I received were good. My average score was 31.87, which I am pleased with. The highest scores were 43s and the lowest score was smack down of a 15 (for a Scottish ale that aged badly).

The two scores of 43 that I received were for my “Tobias Fünke” flanders red and for my “Fargin Eishole” eisbock. The flanders red won 1st place for the Sour Ale category, and the eisbock won 3rd place for the Bock category. The feedback for these was very good but, honestly, how unhappy can you be with a beer that scores in the 40s?

The other beer that placed was my “Slow Motion Walter, Fire Engine Guy” oak-aged, smoked Baltic porter. It scored a 30.5 and it must have squeaked in to 3rd place in the Smoke-Flavored and Wood-Aged Beer category. The feedback for that was good, but both judges wanted a bit more smoke flavor in the beer. I can completely see that. I enjoy all styles of beer, but smoked beers are at the very bottom of that list. So, in making a smoked beer of my own, I went a little light on the Bamberg malt. I can live with that feedback because I’m not sure I’ll ever make a beer that I can’t enjoy just to do well in a competition. That’s BS to me.

My bourbon-oak tripel did really well and scored a 39.5, but it did not ribbon. This was simply a gallon of my tripel that I siphoned onto French oak cubes and Blanton’s bourbon. My feedback for that beer said it was nicely balanced and creamy. I agree, and it will be hard not to bourbon-oak the entire batch next time I make a tripel.

The only head scratchers were scores for the original tripel and the brett saison. The tripel received a 30, and it was downgraded for not having enough of a phenolic character. I think most American tripels are over-the-top with phenols so I specifically fermented that one cold to keep them subdued. But I can’t blame the judges for not “getting” what I was trying to do.

The other strange one was my brett saison which received a 31.5. (And it did pretty well in The Bruery’s Batch 300 competition.) Both judges only sensed a “slight sourness”…..which is mystifying. If it was supposed to be a sour saison, I would have marked it as such. This was a brett saison and brettanomyces does not make things sour. That is disappointing.

But, all and all, I’m happy with what I heard back from the Nashville region of the AHA NHC 2011 First Round. Hopefully one of my three beers advancing to the final round lucks into a medal. If not, there’s always 2012.

2011 is here and, like my Barlow Brewing 2009 Homebrew Year in Review, it is time to look back at 2010 and see what the hell happened.

On the surface of things, 2010 was a very off year in homebrewing for me. I usually shoot for at least 60 gallons of beer per year, and I have no problems exceeding that number. Last year was a lot lower, 69 gallons versus 2009’s119 gallons, but life and work took priority over my homebrew hobby, as they should.

But it was big homebrewing year for me in two regards:

I got the honor of making a California Common Pro-Am beer for the GABF with Starr Hill. That was an amazing experience and well worth the hiatus I took afterwards. If I really wanted to cheat, I could add those 360 gallons to my total and figure that I made 429 gallons last year. But this post is about homebrewing.

The second achievement is that I had a beer and a cider make it to the Final Round of the National Homebrew Competition. The beer was my “Procrastinator” doppelbock that I co-brewed with my friend Greg B, and the cider was one that I had made over 2 years ago on a whim.

Anyway, an interesting review for me, and I’m sure it will inform my 2011 brewing.

Number of Batches Made – 14

Number of Gallons Made – 69

First Brew Day – 1/24/2010

Last Brew Day – 12/18/2010

Number of Beer Batches – 11 (10 ales and 1 lager)

Number of Cider/Perry Batches – 3

BJCP Homebrew Competitions Medals Earned – Nine (2 Gold, 3 Silver, 4 bronze, and a beer and a cider advanced to the final round of the National Homebrew Competition)

Batch with Highest Alcohol – 11.64% – Eis-Barleywine

Batch with Lowest Alcohol – 4.7% – Berliner Weisse “Waterloo”

Average Alcohol Across Batches – 6.7%

Favorite Brew – “Tobias Funke” Flanders Red (Very sour Belgian Dark Strong base that shot past an Oud Bruin into a Flanders Red)

Favorite Brew (Runner Up) – “Citra Ass Down” American Pale Ale (a simple APA showcasing Citra hops. Citra is amazing late addition hop)

Worst Brew – “Lakshmi” Chai Milk Stout (A good beer for a few months until diacetyl crept in and made it a butter bomb)

Favorite Name – “Tobias Funke” – Flander Red (Arrested Development reference)

Favorite Name (Runner Up) – “Duncan Keith’s Teeth” Eis-Barleywine (After Duncan Keith, who lost seven teeth in one game of the hockey playoffs.)

Approximate Amount of Grain used in 2010 – 151 pounds (average of 13.7 lbs/brew)

Approximate Amount of Hops used in 2010 – 37.25 ounces, or 2.32 pounds (average of 3.38 oz/brew)

Biggest Equipment Upgrade – Nothing major. I’m shooting pure oxygen into my cooled wort now.)

Biggest Trend – Only One Lager (I don’t know what happened here. My only lager was the smoked Baltic porter I did for the Iron Brewer competition. It was good. Perhaps this speaks to my patience…)

Biggest Trend (Runner Up) – Black Ales – (A Black IPA, a Black Saison, and a Northern Brown with Black Japonica rice)

Do you enter your homebrews into BJCP competitions?

I didn’t for a long, long time. For about 11 years to put too fine a point on it. It wasn’t that I was avoiding them, as much as I didn’t care. I was making pretty good beer, and it was being enjoyed by me and my friends. In the end, that is enough.

But something happened about 3 years ago.

I think it was a combination of getting too much feedback from friends that was the equivalent of “That was awesome, dude”, and me finally figuring out that I was pretty good at making good beer, but not always at identifying and articulating what was good or bad about it.

So I starting entering the Virginia competitions that are put on by the CASK and James River homebrew clubs just to get the feedback and hear what some real judges had to say. I think that has been really helpful and the quality of the judging, while not always amazing (which certainly could be another blog post of its own), has been light-years ahead of my kind and supportive, but ultimately unknowledgeable, non-brewing friends.

It has been pretty cool in the swag and medal collecting way, too. In the past three years I’ve entered the 6 competitions (including the National Homebrew Competition) and I’ve won 28 medals. I credit some of that to being an above average brewer, and some to the fact that I still bottle my beers. So I’m more likely to have beers hanging around to be entered, instead of kicked kegs. The homebrew store gift certificates are really nice, but the medium-sized t-shirts just end up in my homebrew club’s raffle. (Seriously, when was the last time I was a medium? Middle school?) The medals are great to acknowledge what you’ve done and for braggin’ rights, but they aren’t enough motivation by themselves.

Am I done with competitions now?

Maybe. Or perhaps I’m just cutting back.

I feel like I have a better handle on, and palate for, a variety of beers now. I think getting feedback from these competitions, and being a judge on occasion, has improved my brewing.  But I’ve hit a plateau with that, and I will probably remain that limbo until I get around to getting my BJCP certification.

And these competitions do allow a lot of creatively, but they are also real sticklers about nailing the guideline for the style you brewed. That makes sense, but I found that I’m hitting another creative period where my beers probably won’t be fitting into guidelines outside of category 23 and some of the other catch-alls.

Do you enter homebrew competitions? Why or why not? And why do you still, or why did you stop?

Leave a comment below, or hit me up on The Twitter.

Well, if you are reading this, I guess so.

I’m living up to my self-proclaimed moniker of the Lazy Blogger.

But no excuses.  

I took the family on a trip to Europe, and we visited Orval ruins and as well as the Cantillon brewery. 

I’ve been homebrewing, and I even had a beer and a cider make it to the final round of the Nation Homebrew Competition.

I got to use one of my recipes to brew a batch of beer at Starr Hill for our entry into the Great American Beer Festival’s Pro-Am competition.  As I type this post, it should almost be done fermenting and ready for some dry-hopping.  Let’s just say the same brewing principles apply, but there’s a big difference between brewing 6 gallons of beer and brewing 360 gallons of beer.

I’m in the IronBrewer competition, where a bunch of amazing homebrewers get together and test their brewing prowess and creativity by make beers with three assigned and disparate ingredients. (My round requires the use of centennial hops, vanilla beans and smoked malt.)

I’ve been tackling the new Citra hop, and a Black IPA, and the Leuven yeast strain with my homebrews. And let’s not talk about my continued obsession with making sour beers.

Those things ought to be great fodder for a few blog posts, huh?

I promise they will come.

After the Dominion Cup BJCP competition this weekend, I’ll get back on the horse.

A friend of mine did this sort of year-end wrap up on his blog, and I thought it was cool and decided to do one of my own.  For the hardcore homebrewers out there, or those who are trying to break into the ranks of the pros, my list is modest. But the number of batches and gallons I did during 2009 feels a bit absurd to me as a guy trying to hold down a job and a family.

Anyway, an interesting review for me, and I’m sure it will inform my 2010 brewing.

- Number of Batches Made – 20
- Number of Gallons Made – 119
- First Brew Day – 1/3/2009
- Last Brew Day – 12/5/2009
- Number of Beer Batches – 18 (14 ales and 4 lagers)
- Number of Cider Batches – 2
- BJCP Homebrew Competitions Medals Earned – 3 Gold, 5 Silver, 5 bronze, 1 Honorable Mention, and The Dominion Cup Plato Award (Best All Around Brewer)
- Batch with Highest Alcohol – 11.21% – American Barleywine “Wendigo”
- Batch with Lowest Alcohol – 3.8% – Mild “Sonic Death Monkey”
- Average Alcohol Across Batches – 6.49%
- Favorite Brew – “Cleopatra Jones American” Brown ale (Big, hoppy brown ale riffing off McDole’s Janet’s Brown ale)
- Favorite Brew (Runner Up) – “Fritz the Cat” American Wheat ale (a 50% wheat American wheat beer hopped only with Amarillo hops, a Gumballhead clone)
- Favorite Brew – “Stupid Sexy Flanders” Flanders Red (Sours are tough to brew and age, but this Flanders Red aged was on French oak, Pinot Noire and the Roeselare blend was amazing)
- Worst Brew – “Hop Surge” American IPA (It fermented out too low, and I added malto dextrin to bring it back up. Just ended up sweet and gross)
- Worst Idea That Turned Out OK – “Bombay the Hard Way” Coconut Curry Hefeweizen (I thought this one might end up a carbonated marinade, but it did well and won a medal or two.)
- Best Idea That Turned Out Just OK – “Bad Yama Jama” Sweet Potato Ale (It was a good beer, but I should have cranked up the spices and potatoes a bit more)
- Favorite Name – “Stupid Sexy Flanders” (The Simpons are always an inspiration)
- Approximate Amount of Grain used in 2009 – 287.45 pounds (average of 15.97 lbs/brew)
- Approximate Amount of Hops used in 2009 – 56.89 ounces, or 3.55 pounds (average of 3.16 oz/brew)
- Biggest Equipment Upgrade – Converted a 15 gallon keg into a keggle (brewpot)
- Biggest Trend – Sour Ales – Batches Brewed – 4
- Biggest Trend (Runner Up) – Oak Aging – 4 batches aged on French oak

I went down to the Dominion Cup BJCP competition on August 29th with a few of my fellow homebrewers from the CAMRA club in Charlottesville, Va.  The Dominion Cup is the largest homebrew competition in Virginia, and it is run by the James River Homebrewers, which is the Richmond homebrew club.  The three of us were going to help out during the competition in three different roles, and it was my first real chance to see a BJCP judging in person.

The Cup happened at the Capital Ale House Downtown and took place in the Music Hall room behind beside the restaurant and bar.  It was intimate place to see a band, but it was big and roomy venue for a beer judging to go down.  It was a long and dark room with exposed brick walls and dark wood, but the judges were ready with flash lights in hand.

I was assigned to be a steward which basically entails making sure that the judges have everything they need to score and judge their assigned beers.  That means getting the table ready with a pitcher of water, crackers, cups, pens, a dump bucket, the appropriate forms, and any other items they might need.  That’s the easy part.  The interesting, and more challenging part, is keeping the paperwork orderly.  The judges are filling out Beer Scoresheets, and you are trying to keep those straight while juggling the Cover Sheets (to organize all the related papers with each entry) and the flight sheets which track the individual and agreed upon scores for each beer in that category.

The great thing about these competitions is that the beers are judged without knowing the brewer for each beer.  That’s important if you want real and honest feedback from the judges.  Now none of the judges that I met would have been anything less than honest in their reviews of the beers, but it really is hard to say that any among us wouldn’t be unconsciously influenced by knowing the brewer and our perceived notion of their brewing skills and reputation.  To avoid that, beers are separated into the appropriate BJCP guidelines, and they were all in 12 ounce, brown bottles without labels or marks on their caps.  Each bottle then gets a competition label conveying which style of beer it has been submitted to and its cryptic number, which is only linked back to the brewer info’s on a computer held by organizer of the competition.

So part job of the steward job is keeping all of the information together and organized so the right scores and feedback get to back the organizer and the homebrewer who made it.  That is the real bottom line in these competitions: getting quality feedback from experienced judges so you can make better beer and hone your craft.

Of course, the cool part for a steward is being able to listen in to the judges as they talk about each beer after they have thoughtfully filled out their sheets.  It is beer geeking at its best.  You can also taste along with them and compare your mental notes with the experts.  I worked the morning and afternoon sessions, and in the first I was assigned to one of the American Pale Ale tables and, being a popular category, that is all that those judges scored.  For the afternoon, I was assigned to the Porters table and that encompassed Brown Porters, Robust Porters and Baltic Porters, which can vary from each other in significant ways, but they are all still competing against each other in the Porter category.

I was very impressed by palates on the judges and their ability to pick out nuances out of the beers.  One of the huge obstacles in judging can just be taste fatigue.  Realistically, they are only having a few ounces of each beer, but after having a few ounces of 9 beers, my mouth started to get a little tired.  I could certainly drink more than that, and did afterwards, but it a challenge to keep your taste buds focused after wave after wave of beer.  I respect their ability to do so, because I don’t think I’m there yet.

Yeah, this is pretty much my only look.  It is all I have to work with.

Greg did some judging, so he got to see the competition from the other side of the table. 

Tom was a cellarman with Mark from the James River Club.  They had a good but, probably, an occasionally frantic time.   

After the second session was over, it was time for the Best of Show judging.  That was composed of the best beers from each category.  I’m not quite sure how the BOS judging works because it must be hard to compare a Flanders Red with an Oatmeal Stout with a Bohemian Pilsner, etc.  It must just be one of those blink moments where the heavens open up and a few beers just shine through.  

As you can tell from the picture above, it was show of colors and flavors.

In the end, it was a very successful trip for the CAMRA guys.  We got to see how a BJCP competition works, and the club walked away with 15 medals in the competition.  I was very happy to receive the inaugural Plato award, which is a “Brewer of the Year” award, for the most 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd place finishes.

Final results from the 2009 Dominion Cup: http://dominioncup.jrhb.org/DomCupWinners2009.php

Some takeaways:

It looks like putting on a competition of this size is a ton of work.  The Dominion Cup had 366 entries which is very impressive and a big jump from the previous year.  One of the things my club wanted to check out was the feasibility of putting on a competition of our own in the coming years.  We now know that it will be just as difficult as we had imagined.  I have to give lots of credit to the James River Homebrewers for making it all look so seemless and easy.  We know it couldn’t have been, but they did a great job.

The feedback  sheets were good, illuminating and I’m honestly still plowing through those.  Often, the hardest part about feedback is deciphering the handwriting of the judges. (Hint: Cursive = bad.)  Overall, the beers I thought would do well did, and the beers I thought were average, or off style, did just ok.  My highest scores were for my “Fritz the Cat” (Gumballhead clone) American Wheat beer, which scored a 43, and my “Cleopatra Jones” American Brown Ale, which scored a 39.  My lowest were my 27 for “Up on Cripple Kriek” (Kriek Fruit Lambic) which was one of my first sour beers and it really didn’t get sour enough, and my Cherry Waterloo, which scored a 28.5 and it was the subpar side of a split batch of Berliner Weisse.

And it was interesting to see how my younger beers fared.  I submitted an American Barleywine that was only 9 months old, and it took 3^rd place.  And that same 9-month old barleywine, that I aged a little longer on bourbon and oak cubes, took 2^nd place.  Also, my Flanders Red, which is a beer that often doesn’t find its stride until about 18 months, got a 2^nd place medal and it was only about 4 months old.  I’m pretty geeked to see how these beers will taste when they start to hit their peak.

The big surprise, for me, was seeing my entries in the Spice/Herb/Vegetable Beer category do so well.  My Chai Milk Stout (no clever name) got a 1^st place medal, and my Bombay the Hard Way Coconut Curry Hefeweizen got 3^rd place.  (Which is very surprising because I thought that was a failed experiment, but it just need time to age and mellow.) That was very cool, and further fuels my mad scientist method to brewing.  (I should be posting something soon about my Sweet Potato Ale brew day, too.)

Once again, it was a great time, and we look forward to competing again next year.  The club is now more determined than ever to get some of our members BJCP certified.

**2/22/11 Update** 

I sent the Brett B version of the saison (renamed Monsoon Season) to the Batch 300 competition put on by The Bruery. It didn’t get Best of Show, but it did come in first in Category 16. All and all, very cool. The results. 

The second split batch experiment happened on Sunday night with my latest saison. 

I’ve done a few saison homebrews, and I always find I enjoy the bretted and soured batches just a little bit more. Saisons are not complete strangers to wildness and sourness, and some of the more famous examples of the style from Brasserie Fantôme and Brasserie à Vapeur  are amazing because of those notes.  I think it adds more complexity to the beer, and I find myself ramping up the acidulated malt that I put into the mash a little more each time.  The idea behind this experiment was to ferment a saison and then to add a pure brettanomyces culture to one and brett and some souring bacteria into the other. 

The beer started out as one of my standard saison batches with the not-so-secret ingredient of some acidulated malt.  It started out with an OG of 1.068, and I fermented it at around 80 degrees.  It dropped down to a 1.006 less than a week later, and then I let it sit for another week just to clean itself up and let the yeasts drop out.  (I say “yeasts” because I pitch a saison yeast, in this case WLP565, and then a clean Cal ale yeast, the Safale US-05, 48 hours later to insure the beer dries out enough.) 

On Sunday (8/23/09), I split the batch evenly between two 3-gallon carboys.  Into one carboy I pitched a vial of White Labs Brettanomyces Bruxellensis (WLP650), and into the other I pitched a starter I had ramped up from the dregs of an Avery Brabant.  (Yes, this is deviation from the original souring gameplan.) 

The Brett B is a pure culture of that brettanomyces strain and it is often used for secondary fermentation of Belgian beers and lambics.  It creates a medium intensity funk, and it is some pitched at bottling by brewers.  The Avery culture is a bit more of a wildcard.  It is my understanding that the Brabant undergoes a secondary fermentation brett b, too, but it isn’t the same culture as the tube.  The bottle dregs likely include lactobacillus (lacto) and pediococcus (pedio) bacteria. These can add extra tartness and perhaps add a vinegar quality to the beer. 

Since the final gravity of the beer was so low, the bretts shouldn’t have too much to feast upon and that should control the funkiness to a certain degree.  As of two nights later, the brett b carboy doesn’t appear to be doing anything visually, but its airlock seems to be under a bit more pressure.  The Brabant carboy is getting a white foaminess to it, and may be forming a pellicle.  

I’m not sure how long I will let these beers age and evolve.  I will likely taste them every so often and see if they are in a place where I want to bottle them.  

We’ll see where this one ends up.  

As a sidenote, I did use my wine thief a few weeks ago to fill up a few bottles of the pre-brett saison for tasting and a homebrew competition.  I tasted one right before the split and it was very, very good.  It made it harder to pitch uncertainty into what was an amazing beer, but at least I know I have the recipe I want dialed in for the future. 

The recipe for giggles: 

Le Moribond – (Saison) 2009

Starting Gravity: 1.068 (8/2/09) Days @ 80° F
Final Gravity:  1.006 (8/23/09)
8.15% alcohol (by volume)
Apparent Attenuation: 90.71
Real Attenuation: 73.35

Mash (147° 60 min)
10 lb Pilsener Malt
2 lb Golden Promise
1 lb Munich Malt
0.75 Wheat Malt
0.25 CaraMunich 40
0.25 Acidulated Malt (Sauer)
1 lb Cane Sugar

Boil (70 minute boil)
2.0 Hallertauer Leaves (4.3 AA) (60 min)
0.75 Hallertauer Leaves (4.3 AA) (0 min)
1 tablet Whirlfloc (Boil – 15 min.)
½ tsp Brewer’s Choice Wyeast Nutrient Blend (Boil – 10 min.)

Primary (>80° F)

White Labs WLP565 – Starter made
Safale-05 – Packet pitched after 48 hours in primary