Quarterly club only competition suggestions.

[MedicMang]

Hello there. I am the president of the Athens Homebrew Club in Ohio. I am wanting to start a club competition that we would do seasonaly. I have a general idea of how we should run it, but I am looking for ideas/criticism/suggestions of the ideas that I have on the topic.

First off, the categories will be general, but the beer will be judged to bjcp standards of the style that is listed on the beer. Not everyone wants to brew a kolsch, but they can throw that in the session beer category, so I'm going to generalize some categories to get more entries out of people. Categories as followed.


Winter-
Big beers >8
Christmas ales (spiced)
wood aged
IPA/IIPA

Spring-
APA
sour
specialty
cider/mead/wine

Summer-
Session <6
fruit
hybrid
amber

Fall-
pumpkin ale/oktoberfest
porter
brown
adjunct (wheat, rye, corn, etc.)

I haven't really figured out judging logistics yet. Does it make sense to only be allowed to enter 2 categories and have people judge the categories that they didn't enter? I'm just trying to keep people from judging their own, obviously.

I'm sure this conversation will lead to other questions I want opinions on, but this is a good start. Thanks in advance for your input.

 

[GrogNerd]

our club's competitions are monthly, except 2, for 10 competitions per year. schedule is posted in December for the following year to allow brewers time to plan their brew days. usually it's a single style or category, with an occasional broad category (session ales, non-BJCP style) thrown in

depending on # of entries vs # of judges, we might split the entries or not, but the attendees are the judges with scoring based on the 20-point scale (P. 379 in Papazian) and we use the BJCP Style Guide for establishing judging criteria/style appropriateness. All sub-styles within a style category will be acceptable and judged according to the relevant sub-style guidelines.

scores are averaged after tossing highest and lowest. 1st place gets 10 points, 2nd gets 7, 3rd gets 4, entries within style for the month gets 2, you may enter out-of-style, which gets you 1 point.

one competition per year is a co-brew team competition, one or more people with whom they &#8220;normally&#8221; don&#8217;t brew. co-brew gets an extra 2 points that month.

at the end of the year, each person's top 6 scores are added together to determine Brewer of the Year. Brewer of the Year is invited to brew a pro/am beer with a local commercial brewery