Home Brew Competition Scoring

[Doctor Jay]

I am no expert in the field, however I am under the impression that competitions are scored using pen and paper.

I have a rating website for craft beer, and can see the benefits of utiliting the framework with slight adjustments in order to have a system that could be used to track beers through a competition process.

On top of the digitisation of the judging of competition, I foresee other advantage that the software would include the tracking of batches helping to track improvements, have friends rate your beers, have your own home brew profile.

There would also be ability to have event calendar, Home Brew club directory and classifieds.

I’m just curious to get peoples opinion to see if this would be worth pursuing.

 

[moonhead]

Who are you referring to here? Individual brewers, or competition judges?

Competition judges fill out scoresheets with pen and paper pretty much exclusively. There's many reasons for this, none of which would prevent moving to a computerised system, other than time and money. (Basically home brew comps can't afford to give each judge a waterproof laptop or tablet to use, and I suspect quite a lot of judges would take considerably longer to fill out comments by typing, than by hand writing).

If you're talking about an individual brewer scoring their own beers, that would be a bit more practical. Untapped kind of already does this, but the scoring is your normal subjective personal preference scoring, rather than the objective guideline and category based scoring you'd use in a competition.

 

[Doctor Jay]

Who are you referring to here? Individual brewers, or competition judges? /QUOTE]

Thank you for your constructive feedback.

My initial thoughts are/were for a combination of both individual and competition judges. I see advantages for using it in both circumstances where current options are not available.

I agree that there are hurdles to having in local competitions, however thinking through options to remove these obstacles.

I do see the benifits for home brewers though, and although there are options available, like Untappd as you mentioned, I feel that this is a matter of settling for what’s out there rather that it being a good option.

How to integrate these two different aspects is another issue that I will need to think about.