I've found that most people have a tendency to overlook the flaws in beers they've made themselves until someone points it out to them. I'm guilty of the same and I'm a BJCP National Judge.
Judging the beer that wasn't there.
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I've found that most people have a tendency to overlook the flaws in beers they've made themselves until someone points it out to them. I'm guilty of the same and I'm a BJCP National Judge.
GarageDweller
Well-Known Member
"that fruity little club" -:fro:
kad2371
Member
OK, I work in Quality Control and I can tell you that you are right, people make mistakes and whenever people are involved in a process there are bound to be errors.
I can also tell you, however, that the types of mistakes being discussed in this thread sound like should be easy to prevent. The system is clearly broken in some of these cases.
My customers expect ZERO defects. Frankly a process to guarantee the correct bottle is getting scored would be easy to implement so if I was enterring I would expect an error rate of zero as well. OK, a lost entry, or a lost bottle, that can happen. But it should be impossible for the WRONG bottle to be judged.
Just my 2 cents.
Sir-Brews-Alot
Well-Known Member
I don't know about you, but I don't have the best palate. Whereas most judges are at least partially trained to recognize certain flavors or problems. That is what I rely on to improve my process.
And I'm sure most people who drink Bud Light* think they know good beer too.
*QUEUE all the responses about how it IS a good beer for it's style and how it is flawlessly brewed etc. etc.
I don't know about you, but I don't have the best palate. Whereas most judges are at least partially trained to recognize certain flavors or problems. That is what I rely on to improve my process.
And I'm sure most people who drink Bud Light* think they know good beer too.
*QUEUE all the responses about how it IS a good beer for it's style and how it is flawlessly brewed etc. etc.
Alright. Here's my final word on this. Maybe ignorance is bliss in my case. Maybe I've been making and drinking flawed beers all this time. I can accept that. I'm certainly not going to pay an entrance fee for a third party to tell me what's "wrong" with something I find perfectly acceptable. Especially with the chance of getting a score sheet back for a beer that wasn't even shipped to the competition. I'm with dude above that there should be zero errors based on the fact that it's an easy fix.
Comparing me drinking my beers and calling them good to a Bud Light drinker calling it good is borderline insulting. I assure you my beers are better than Bud Light. And I don't need third party verification on that claim.
I'm out.
Darwin18
Well-Known Member
Well said. I've done the same. Ugly baby syndrome can be difficult for all of us to overcome.
machfive55
Well-Known Member
OK, so I'll vent a little here. I just got my NHC score sheets and I feel slighted at the level of feedback that I got, especially for the money I paid to enter. Many local comps have done way better.
For instance, I really got dinged on aroma for one of my beers, as in the judges just couldn't detect anything. Now, granted, these are more sessionable beers, by design, but, they are not lacking aroma. In fact they even checked that the aroma was flawed because they couldn't detect it. I will tell you, that just letting a small sample of the beer warm for a minute or two gave me all kinds of aroma, some really good stuff BTW. So, what happened here?
One judge told me to mash lower. Really? Firstly how does he even know it was an all grain beer to give such advice? Secondly I'm mashing at 148 and he wants me to go lower, really? This is NHC? What's going on here?
The reason I enter comps is to get feedback from someone who can tell me more than, "yeah, its good". But, that's basically what I got outta the score sheets. I may stick to local comps from here on out and save my money.
One good piece of information is one of two judges detected slight diacetyl in my beer. I actually noticed it too but wasn't sure. Interestingly, whenever they detect anything they always say "check sanitation". I always love that comment as if its something you have a laboratory to check your process. Interestingly my sanitation is always crazy careful (although who can be sure), but, my fermentation temperature, well that may be a different story...this particular beer was fermented low with an american ale yeast.
For instance, I really got dinged on aroma for one of my beers, as in the judges just couldn't detect anything. Now, granted, these are more sessionable beers, by design, but, they are not lacking aroma. In fact they even checked that the aroma was flawed because they couldn't detect it. I will tell you, that just letting a small sample of the beer warm for a minute or two gave me all kinds of aroma, some really good stuff BTW. So, what happened here?
One judge told me to mash lower. Really? Firstly how does he even know it was an all grain beer to give such advice? Secondly I'm mashing at 148 and he wants me to go lower, really? This is NHC? What's going on here?
The reason I enter comps is to get feedback from someone who can tell me more than, "yeah, its good". But, that's basically what I got outta the score sheets. I may stick to local comps from here on out and save my money.
One good piece of information is one of two judges detected slight diacetyl in my beer. I actually noticed it too but wasn't sure. Interestingly, whenever they detect anything they always say "check sanitation". I always love that comment as if its something you have a laboratory to check your process. Interestingly my sanitation is always crazy careful (although who can be sure), but, my fermentation temperature, well that may be a different story...this particular beer was fermented low with an american ale yeast.
Sir-Brews-Alot
Well-Known Member
Alright. Here's my final word on this. Maybe ignorance is bliss in my case. Maybe I've been making and drinking flawed beers all this time. I can accept that. I'm certainly not going to pay an entrance fee for a third party to tell me what's "wrong" with something I find perfectly acceptable. Especially with the chance of getting a score sheet back for a beer that wasn't even shipped to the competition. I'm with dude above that there should be zero errors based on the fact that it's an easy fix.
Comparing me drinking my beers and calling them good to a Bud Light drinker calling it good is borderline insulting. I assure you my beers are better than Bud Light. And I don't need third party verification on that claim.
I'm out.
I meant no disrespect, sorry if it came across that way. I guess I was just trying to let you know why I choose to get the opinions of judges rather than rely on my own opinion, due to my own flaws as a taster. I want to brew beer that is as good or better than commercial beer. Competitions are just a means to an end for me based on my own inadequacies.
I encountered a group of women discussing babies. Anns baby is so cute Sallys baby is so cute. I interjected Oh cmon, arent all babies cute?. The subject instantly changed. Oh no! Debbies baby is so ugly Kathys baby is so ugly
It seems some of us want someone to tell us if our babys ugly, some dont want to know.
Lets be careful to know which baby were talking about. If you enter your baby in a beauty contest, you want to be sure theyre talkin about your baby.
So I would say to the people that insist they have great beer and wont enter a contest; we all know you have an ugly baby, youre the only one that doesnt know.
It seems some of us want someone to tell us if our babys ugly, some dont want to know.
Lets be careful to know which baby were talking about. If you enter your baby in a beauty contest, you want to be sure theyre talkin about your baby.
So I would say to the people that insist they have great beer and wont enter a contest; we all know you have an ugly baby, youre the only one that doesnt know.
The AHA made it clear that they were going to use the checklist style score sheet for this competition. This says to me that it's really not the competition to enter if you want feedback. You're lucky that you got as much feedback as you did.
Unless you have a beer that you believe has a good chance to make it past the first round, I would suggest leaving that spot for someone else that might have a chance and get your feedback from another comp.
Totally agree with Spartan NHC is not a good comp for getting feedback. Best place to get feedback is from a Homebrew club, or having someone who is a judge it, and give you feedback. Just make sure you tell them you're feeling wont be hurt by their comments. Some clubs do mini club only contests, where the people judging the beer don't know who brewed it, this would probably be the best for getting feedback.
Sir-Brews-Alot
Well-Known Member
I would agree with this. I've only entered NHC once, and while I did get into the 2nd round, I just wasn't happy with the feedback, particularly in the first round. Seems like more of a pissin' match than anything, IMO.
Now some of my (semi) local comps I have gotten some GREAT feedback. I've entered into the German Stein Fest Challenge a few times and actually had one of my beers judged by Gordon Strong. Now that's reliable feedback.
I've also gotten pretty good and reliable feedback at the Badger Brewoff, Schooner Homebrew Championship, and BABBLE Brewoff off the top of my head.jweikert
Member
Since this was my competition, I'd be happy to respond publicly.
First, here's how you end up with accounting problems in a competition like this: beers are tagged and their bottle label gets an identical tag so that you can tie the judging number to the entry number. Ten people are sorting 1400 bottles of beer, and one or two tagged bottle labels go missing (for whatever reason). You end up with beers in the cases that are "orphaned." I'll take 100% of the responsibility for that, and in every case we (and the AHA) try to find out whose beer is unaccounted for and refund them their money.
Now, as for the e-mail cosmo received, a message was sent to ALL entrants who had paid for entries but whose beer wasn't listed as "received" to verify that they didn't ship/drop their beer. This was done to elicit a response from those who DID enter their beer so that we could compare their entries against our "orphaned" entries, since in every case there was only one for that particular category/flight (luckily). In cosmo's case we had two orphaned entries in the proper categories (they were sorted by style at that point already), and ONLY he claimed them. They're clearly his entries - or we had the most incredible coincidence in the history of homebrewing.
At the end of judging we had scoresheets for every beer entered, all entries were tied to a specific entrant, there were ZERO bottles remaining, ZERO missing or extra scoresheets, and all of our results were mailed in under 36 hours (would have been less, but post offices aren't open on Sundays). If that sounds to you like we don't know how to run a competition, then I don't know what to say.
Josh Weikert
Competition Organizer
NHC 1st Round - Philadelphia
Nine THOUSAND beers. If you weren't happy leave the slots for people who aren't quite so critical next year. I had 7 beers ready, the fact that I could only enter 4 of them while people who were destined to complain about their scores/scoresheet/judges got spots leads me to have little tolerance for the "venting". I didn't agree with everything the judges had to say about my beer either, but you know what? If I did, there'd be no point in asking an unbiased 3rd party to judge my beer.
Try volunteering to help out the volunteers who judged your beer. Try seeing how one of these things goes down, and the logistical challenge a contest of this size is. Try being a judge who wants to give EVERY SINGLE BEER his/her best unbiased work. You're entitled to that effort from those judges by virtue of your entry fee. That's all you're entitled too.
Josh, thank you for your efforts. Having seen the Sac region go down first hand I have the utmost respect for the diligence it takes to navigate such a large competition.
Try volunteering to help out the volunteers who judged your beer. Try seeing how one of these things goes down, and the logistical challenge a contest of this size is. Try being a judge who wants to give EVERY SINGLE BEER his/her best unbiased work. You're entitled to that effort from those judges by virtue of your entry fee. That's all you're entitled too.
Josh, thank you for your efforts. Having seen the Sac region go down first hand I have the utmost respect for the diligence it takes to navigate such a large competition.
Flipadelphia
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Owned.
hi josh - thanks for the response.
is this standard practice? are competition organizers supposed to do this?
i ask because fedex lost my package, so my beers never made it to the comp. i only found out about this after the competition because i didn't receive a scoresheet. i contacted the organizers to inquire about my scoresheet, and only then did they look up my entries and saw that they were never received.
is this standard practice? are competition organizers supposed to do this?
i ask because fedex lost my package, so my beers never made it to the comp. i only found out about this after the competition because i didn't receive a scoresheet. i contacted the organizers to inquire about my scoresheet, and only then did they look up my entries and saw that they were never received.
jweikert
Member
We weren't specifically instructed to, no - but since we had the motivation (wanted to identify our few unknown beers) and the technology (didn't take long to put the list of non-received entries together), it seemed like a good idea. We had a very diligent registrar who was on-the-ball-enough to look for unclaimed "judging" numbers, and we then went through the cases to find which categories they were in so we could potentially identify them if folks popped who claimed they'd entered.
It's like how you don't just say, "hey, found a wallet!" You ask if anyone lost anything and if they say, "I misplaced a brown leather wallet with 'Bad Mother F---er' on it," you know it's theirs. Or something like that.
jweikert
Member
"Those guys" gave their time and effort to put on a competition, and your opinion of their skill at doing it is beyond irrelevant. We had incredible volunteers, stewards, and judges, and they did an outstanding job.
As for whether the problem can be fixed, see my previous post on the matter. It CAN be addressed with a high level of confidence, and if you'd like to challenge the logic of our methods please feel free to do so. I'd be happy to respond.
Well Josh, thats certainly different than the account we got two weeks ago from cosmo.
I certainly dont mean to impugn the volunteers, they make the whole thing work.
I would like to suggest your process is flawed. By your account it worked fairly well, though I dont know how entry stickers would fall off of both bottles. If the original account is right, multiple errors were made and your process didnt catch it. The time to fix stuff is on check-in day.
jweikert
Member
Point in fact, my process DID catch it, and at the first available opportunity. There's no process that would catch it in real time. How would you know you had missing entries until all of the entries you checked in have been checked in?
Both entry stickers didn't fall off bottles, ONE entry sticker (and it's attached bottle label) didn't make it to the box that the Registrar used to check in beers. I'm not clear on where the "multiple errors" were in that process. That's one error, and a perfectly understandable one (in my book) when you have ten people sorting/tagging up to 760 entries.
We had five missing tagged bottle labels out of 698 received entries from 312 entrants, so 99.3% of beers from 99.4% of entrants were properly tagged, sorted, and recorded. The very few outliers were tracked down immediately, and we accounted for all 760 entries, even those that didn't arrive.
One potential fix is to check them in through BCOE&M in real-time BEFORE the bottle labels are removed but AFTER they're tagged, but as we didn't have WiFi in the fridge where this all went down, that wasn't an option, hence the saving of the bottle labels and subsequent check-in.
Another is to tag and save BOTH labels from both bottles and sort them into two separate boxes, so you can have a second shot at getting the right judging number paired to the entry number. That's a realistic option, but even in this case I'd argue it is a solution in search of a problem that creates a lot of work for very little return, and has the added bonus of taking a lot longer in the long run.
I'm all in favor of improving the process if you have a suggestion. That suggestion, though, can't be predicated on a belief that mistakes won't happen - it's unrealistic, all the more so with so many hands in the process.
On a personal note, I think the tone of criticisms of these competitions is insanely negative for both the magnitude of what's at stake and the nature of the hobby itself. Whatever happened to "Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew"? Especially when the OVERWHELMING majority of entries are properly received, handled, and judged.
The 165,000 members here who haven't posted are relaxing and drinking their homebrew and probably have the attitude you're expecting. So, thanks for doing what you do and keep up the good work, sir.
The people who have posted here, positive or negative, are certainly on your side. While you know that there was only 1 problem, they don't know that. This is a discussion forum, and when things go wrong they get discussed here.
Flipadelphia
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1. People love to criticize over the internet anonymously.
2. You generally only hear from the complainers in any industry.
3. Keep up the good work.
You had my plain old run-of-the-mill respect with your initial post. Your Pulp Fiction reference gives you my undying respect. Props dude, and carry on being awesome.
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