Kit Beer Bos At The Nationals

[pint of lager]

Congratulations Dan.

You obviously put alot of effort into your brews and justly deserve your high award.

Everyone should remember when entering competitions, there is only one brewer in the world with the unique combination of skill level, equipment and ingredients. You can only really compete against yourself.

Brew the best beer you can with your particular skill level and ingredients.

 

[Kai]

Central to this is the question: just what exactly are you judging in a competition? Is it the beer as an end to itself, and the method is immaterial, or are we judging the beer as a representation of the brewer's skill and technique?

I'm glad you posted this, Steve, as it saved me a lot of rambling to come to a specific point. Judging in competitions, as far as I think they are about and as far as I think they should be about, is about judging the beer to a style guideline.

How it was brewed is immaterial. Even if someone has bought a wort kit they have still managed the fermentation themselves, packaged it and carbonated it to the appropriate level and stored it for the right amount of time. That's a still a lot of work to get everything right.

If we differentiate based on extract / partial / all-grain due to the difficulty involved, then shouldn't we also give credence to those people who alter their water profiles, step or decoct when considered apt, malt their own grain, etc, etc? After all, they have taken the more complicated route. Rather than drawing this arbitrary line in the sand, judging each entry purely on its sensory merits seems both the simplest and the most sensible route. After all, a good beer is a good beer.

Oh yes, and most importantly congratulations to Dan on a brew well done. It is just as easy to stuff up a kit as it is an all-grain beer.

 

[sah]

This is an excellent thread. I've managed to read half of it so far. I think it'll be particularly useful for kit and extract brewers who are considering going all grain.

I reallly like MAH's strong opinions although I don't agree.

Making top notch beer is not easy. Whether kit, extract, partial or AG there are a lot of common variables to get right. Sanitation, yeast, temperature, non-oxidisation, carbonation, etc.

When you take more control say with all grain brewing there are more variables that you can get wrong. When you buy a good kit you can expect a good brewer has done a lot of experimenting and testing.

I've made some cracking all grain beers. I'm not sure though that I've made a an AG APA that has been as good as my extract brews yet. It's a little hard to tell though because I haven't tested side by side. I think the reason for this is because its a style I'm very familiar with and I've felt it is something I can experiment with. When you experiment, often the results aren't what you expect. I think one of the biggest advantages of all grain brewing is the variety and uniqueness of beer that you can brew.

When it comes to judging I think all methods should be judged side by side. However, the entries should identify the method and ingredients for feedback purposes and for sharing with other entrants. Competitions should be as much about judging the best brews as they should be about providing feedback. I'm not sure how to control for bias between methods with the judges. Perhaps they do their discussion and point scoring before learning the method, then they write their feedback?

Scott

 

[Steve Lacey]

I'm glad you posted this, Steve, as it saved me a lot of rambling to come to a specific point. Judging in competitions, as far as I think they are about and as far as I think they should be about, is about judging the beer to a style guideline.

Yep, I definitely think this question of what is actually being judged is what has to be discussed/debated to make progress on this. I agree that the judging process is undertaken by judging the beer that is presented to the judge according to 1) How well it fits a specified style, plus 2) its overall impression and drinkability. But it is still not the beers that are competing, it is the creators of the beer.

How it was brewed is immaterial. Even if someone has bought a wort kit they have still managed the fermentation themselves, packaged it and carbonated it to the appropriate level and stored it for the right amount of time. That's a still a lot of work to get everything right.

Yes, true, but what they are getting right is the fermentation and packaging process. Is it appropriate to to judge that set of skills alone alongside someone who has undertaken mashing, lautering, and boiling in addition to fermenting and packaging?

I'm sure we can all agree that you can't just buy a beer from the bottle shop and enter it. We would also probably mostly agree that it is wrong to enter a beer under the name of any person other than that of the person who brewed it. So surely we can agree that we are indeed judging the beer only as a reflection of the brewer's skills. So then what we have to agree on is: what defines a reasonable common set of skills that are up for judging?

The segregation argument is that if you take mashing, lautering, and boiling out of the process, it differs sufficiently to make it an "unfair" (or rather, invalid) comparison. If you have a model ship building contest, would we agree that the models built from scratch should compete against those built from commercial kits with assembly instructions? In a furniture making contest, is it valid to put up your Ikea chest of drawers against one built from scratch with dovetail joints etc? I think these are valid analogies.

Kai also said:

shouldn't we also give credence to those people who alter their water profiles, step or decoct when considered apt, malt their own grain, etc, etc? After all, they have taken the more complicated route.

Kai, sorry I think these are spurious arguments. What I would stress is that you need to define a common set of skills or common base process. Any variations or additions that the brewer makes are a reflection of greater or lesser skills within that base definition.

For simplicity for the moment, let's say that we have an all-grain competition stream and a kit-based competition stream. Within the all-grain competition stream you would be neither required nor prevented from using decoctions or altering your brewing water or malting your own grain. If a brewer makes better beer by using these processes, than that would be a fair reflection of a more skillful brewer (or maltster/brewer) within the general parameters that you are competing on the basis of brewing an all-grain beer. Likewise, a kit-based stream would have at its core a requirement for something along the lines of: "a beer based on a commercially available can or cans of hopped extract." This leaves it open for the kit brewer to adopt different types of brewing sugar, specialty grains, or finishing hops. It would arguably even be valid to go a step further and define a minimum proportion of the fermentables that should come from hopped extract, e.g. around 50% or 60%.

I repeat, this is not about holding all-grain beer or brewing to be intrinsically of greater value or "better". It is just about making sure competition occurs on a relatively common base. The Mash Paddle takes that concept to the logical extreme, but I am talking about something more pragmatic for adoption on a broad scale. I haven't got a clear answer for how you handle unhopped extract beers, or quite where mini-mashes fit in, but I can see possibilities and am sure that could be worked out in the detail.

Finally, I really can't see an argument for including unmodified fresh wort packs or house-recipe BOP-produced beer as something for inclusion in competitions. To what extent do these reflect the brewer's skill? If the fresh wort kits are modified with hops or specialty malt additions, then make a competion for beer produced from fresh wort packs.

Steve

 

[MHB]

So the question becomes -

Would an AG beer have a different set of stylistic descriptors or be judged to the same standard?

If the former we have to start from scratch and create them.
If the latter there is no point in separating the beers.

AG brewers keep talking about the Kit Tang, if it exists, arent kit based brewers already at a handicap?
AG brewers have total control of what ends up in the finished beer, shouldn't that be an advantage rather than a disadvantage to a competent brewer.

I think it is going to be impossible to start putting the wall back up, judges are only judging what is in front of them, to expect a judge to start taking things like the reported ingredients into account is a mine field nobody wants to play in.

We are finally reaching the stage where we have a pool of trained judges giving consistent scores and valuable feedback to the brewer, count your blessings, this is the best it has ever been, and it is getting better.

I recon if you arent winning comps and you want to - brew better beer.

A cynical outside observer might get the impression that some AG brewers' think they can't compete with kit brewers and want to take there bat and ball home with them. The same applies to BOP and Wort-Packs, if they have a huge advantage and can turn out the best beer, why are we here?

MHB

 

[sah]

Steve, I interpret your argument to be similar to judging an all grain brew versus a kit or wort pack to an original essay versus one that has been plagiarised.

MHB's argument is, what does it matter? The best beer or essay should win.

And I agree. Although there should be credit where credit is due. If a winning beer is made from a kit or wort pack, the entrant should acknowledge its creator.

Now to extend the argument a little and at the risk of becoming ridiculous. Let's say I got permission from a professional brewer, big or small, to enter one of their award winning beers in a local competition. I acknowledge that this is what I've done and walk away with the prize money. Is that fair?

Theoretically we could find that a wort pack consistently finishes at the top of home brew competitions. This isn't all that much different to my contrived example about entering a commercial beer.

Food for thought.

regards
Scott

 

[user 384]

If it's the beer being judged then why do we award the prize to the brewer?

Because the brewer is being judged, the beer is the means of assessment and the style guidelines are the standard of assessment.

We already have an implicit definition of brewing for the purpose of competitions and that is the individual adds the yeast. Personally I think this a woefully inadequate definition.

I don't see why so much time and energy is spent on the procedures and policies for competitions such as detailed style guidelines, beer judge courses, etc, but we pay less than lip service to the definition of the very thing we claim to be judging. What's the point of having sophisticated mechanisms for judging something we can't properly define?

Cheers
MAH

 

[shotduck]

The way I see it the primary reasons for amateur brewing competitions are to encourage the appreciation of better beer, to give blind feedback to people on their entries, and to encourage people new to the hobby.

And here I was thinking the reason was to stroke the ego's of a person who wants the world to know he is just as good as any professional brewer out there - better dammit! I've spent thousands of dollars on a fully automated, heat-exchanged, BMP operated, pump-driven, shiny penis extension, and eleven hours decocting this wonderful, perfect example of a brew as set out by style-guidelines... and there's no way in hell, I am letting someone who spent $100 on a coopers starter kit take the prize that is rightfully mine, just because his beer tastes better! :lol: :lol: :lol:

What I would stress is that you need to define a common set of skills or common base process.

As far as I can tell, the "common base process" has been defined as "Sprinkling the yeast into the wort". What you want then, is a more complicated common base process.

If it's the beer being judged then why do we award the prize to the brewer?

Because beer does not have a mantle piece on which to hang the shiny new trophy?

EDIT: Spelling etc...

 

[Stuster]

If it's the beer being judged then why do we award the prize to the brewer?

Because beer does not have a mantle piece on which to hang their shiny new trophy?

:lol:

I say give it to the yeasties, the real brewers. :super: Of course, they'd have to split the prize a billion ways. :unsure:

 

[shotduck]

Because beer does not have a mantle piece on which to hang their shiny new trophy?


:lol:

I say give it to the yeasties, the real brewers. :super: Of course, they'd have to split the prize a billion ways. :unsure:

And if the prize is a vial of White Labs??? But then, there would be laws against that sort of thing

 

[Steve Lacey]

As far as I can tell, the "common base process" has been defined as "Sprinkling the yeast into the wort". What you want then, is a more complicated common base process.

Yes, exactly. The current definition is inadequate. In fact, as David said, they adopted that definition for the NSW comp because, generally speaking, there was no definition. So if there was no definition across the various comps, they obviously would not have felt comfortable coming up with something rather detailed and complicated as it would have stood out like the proverbials against the absence of definitions elsewhere.

But that is exactly what should be done. Define what is eligible for entry into comps. And make it something much more than just sprinkling yeast.

This is a case of the Emperor having no clothes. We have just gone along for years assuming that all beer made in the home is home brew and is created equal. But it is not. There has always been a clear difference between the all-grain and kit-based brewing processes, but it has taken the appearance of fresh wort kits to really highlight this in the context of brewing skill competitions. It forces us to confront the question about when is brewing brewing...presently there is nothing to stop a person pitching some liquid yeast in a fresh wort kit, fermenting it, bottling it, and entering it into a comp. So what would the final score of that beer actually mean? To what extent does it reflect that the brewer has the knowledge and skills required to brew a beer to be a good representation of the style?

This is the question that you have to grapple with: what does that number on the bottom of the score sheet actually mean?

Steve

 

[Weizguy]

Because beer does not have a mantle piece on which to hang their shiny new trophy?
:lol:

I say give it to the yeasties, the real brewers. :super: Of course, they'd have to split the prize a billion ways. :unsure:

The yeast could share the prize if the prize was a kit or a Fresh Wort pack.

 

[apd]

No grappling needed. The number means, "This beer has this rating."

Like others have said, if it tastes good, who cares? And more to the point, even if we wanted to have different streams (kit/ag/fresh wort - 'fresh' - there's another thread altogether) how can the standards be enforced?

Other than 'kit twang', which isn't a very scientific measure, there's no test that can determine the process by which a beer was made, so why bother?

 

[shotduck]

This is the question that you have to grapple with: what does that number on the bottom of the score sheet actually mean?

To me, it has always meant that the beer is a good representation of the style. I guess when it comes to people getting feedback from something they have created as part of their hobby, they want personal recognition - particularly those who work harder to achieve the same result. In this case I think perhaps it may be time to split the competitions (split the hairs?) into home beer competitions, and home brewing competitions, with the former concentrating only on the final product, and the latter on both the product, and the journey... Not something I would have liked to see myself, but it may be the only way to satisfy the argument.

 

[AndrewQLD]

To me, it has always meant that the beer is a good representation of the style. I guess when it comes to people getting feedback from something they have created as part of their hobby, they want personal recognition - particularly those who work harder to achieve the same result. In this case I think perhaps it may be time to split the competitions (split the hairs?) into home beer competitions, and home brewing competitions, with the former concentrating only on the final product, and the latter on both the product, and the journey... Not something I would have liked to see myself, but it may be the only way to satisfy the argument.

Good points
When you enter a beer in a competition you brew the beer to a particular catagory and style, when the beer is judged it is awarded points based on how close it is to the catagory and Style it was entered into.
I really don't see it makes any difference how the beer was made, if it is not in style it shouldn't win.

How many commercial brewers out there pretend to emmulate a specific style and fall woefully short. Would they win if the beer was not to style? No they wouldn't.

If a brewer can take a can of coopers and turn it into a great Bohemien Pilsner and be judged true to style, then he is a better brewer than me and deserves to win. Because I have never brewed a standard K&K that tasted like a great Bo Pils, they needed tweaking, more hops, more malt, boil for an hour liquid yeast ect. So they have brewed a great beer and deserve the credit.

Cheers
Andrew

 

[PostModern]

If a brewer can take a can of coopers and turn it into a great Bohemien Pilsner and be judged true to style, then he is a better brewer than me and deserves to win. Because I have never brewed a standard K&K that tasted like a great Bo Pils, they needed tweaking, more hops, more malt, boil for an hour liquid yeast ect. So they have brewed a great beer and deserve the credit.

I have tasted a great Bo Pils made from a wort kit. The only difference between that and a can of concentrate is the degree of dilution.

 

[DanRayner]

Yes, exactly. The current definition is inadequate. In fact, as David said, they adopted that definition for the NSW comp because, generally speaking, there was no definition. So if there was no definition across the various comps, they obviously would not have felt comfortable coming up with something rather detailed and complicated as it would have stood out like the proverbials against the absence of definitions elsewhere.

But that is exactly what should be done. Define what is eligible for entry into comps. And make it something much more than just sprinkling yeast.

This is a case of the Emperor having no clothes. We have just gone along for years assuming that all beer made in the home is home brew and is created equal. But it is not. There has always been a clear difference between the all-grain and kit-based brewing processes, but it has taken the appearance of fresh wort kits to really highlight this in the context of brewing skill competitions. It forces us to confront the question about when is brewing brewing...presently there is nothing to stop a person pitching some liquid yeast in a fresh wort kit, fermenting it, bottling it, and entering it into a comp. So what would the final score of that beer actually mean? To what extent does it reflect that the brewer has the knowledge and skills required to brew a beer to be a good representation of the style?

This is the question that you have to grapple with: what does that number on the bottom of the score sheet actually mean?

Steve

This thread has become far more objective and very interesting After reading some of these later posts I find myself somewhat conflicted and see how difficult it might become in drawing a line in the sand if we segregate entries. How does one define an all-grain beer? I know that Belgian beers often have candy sugar added to them which would no longer make them "all-grain", and if one is allowed to add candy sugar then surely it might be OK to add a tin of coopers' to an otherwise all-mashed-all-grain to up the OG? Or does it then become a mini-mash?

But I do come back to my first belief that it matters little to the judges how a beer is made:

When you enter a beer in a competition you brew the beer to a particular catagory and style, when the beer is judged it is awarded points based on how close it is to the catagory and Style it was entered into.
I really don't see it makes any difference how the beer was made, if it is not in style it shouldn't win.

Yes, this is about judging beer and how well a beer tastes and fits to a specific style.

Yes, true, but what they are getting right is the fermentation and packaging process. Is it appropriate to to judge that set of skills alone alongside someone who has undertaken mashing, lautering, and boiling in addition to fermenting and packaging?

I'm sure we can all agree that you can't just buy a beer from the bottle shop and enter it. We would also probably mostly agree that it is wrong to enter a beer under the name of any person other than that of the person who brewed it. So surely we can agree that we are indeed judging the beer only as a reflection of the brewer's skills. So then what we have to agree on is: what defines a reasonable common set of skills that are up for judging?

...

I repeat, this is not about holding all-grain beer or brewing to be intrinsically of greater value or "better". It is just about making sure competition occurs on a relatively common base. The Mash Paddle takes that concept to the logical extreme, but I am talking about something more pragmatic for adoption on a broad scale. I haven't got a clear answer for how you handle unhopped extract beers, or quite where mini-mashes fit in, but I can see possibilities and am sure that could be worked out in the detail.

I agree - there really should be a way that differing brewers' efforts should be recognised and maybe a level playing field is important - but I'm not altogether sure it should be by complete segregation and different competitions - to my mind, judging them side by side without the judges knowing whether an entry if K&K or AG, is a fantastic way of seeing how the different methods are progressing in the community.

I think it is going to be impossible to start putting the wall back up, judges are only judging what is in front of them, to expect a judge to start taking things like the reported ingredients into account is a mine field nobody wants to play in.

We are finally reaching the stage where we have a pool of trained judges giving consistent scores and valuable feedback to the brewer, count your blessings, this is the best it has ever been, and it is getting better.

Maybe there should be one competition and entries should only be split into K&K/Mini-mash/AG once side-by-side blind-judging and scoring has been completed - as MHB says judges should only be asked to judge how the beer tastes and suits the style it is entered into. Then it would be quite clear how all-grain entries are doing against the K&K. In the same competition, in the same judging round it would be very interesting to see how (for example) the 1st place All-Grain Bo Pils (with a score of 121 or something) compares to the 1st place K&K Bo Pils (scoring 119 or whatever).

Also, judges' feedback is, at least in the ACT, usually restricted to identifying the attributes and chemicals that create different aromas, flavours, mouthfeels (ie: "dominated by diacetyl - not appropriate for a pilsener") and not usually to identify problems in recipe like "add more dark malt extract" or "use less melanoiden malt" - it is up to the brewer to find out how his/her recipe/technique can be modified to fix faults and comments are not specific to K&K/AG methods. So the poster of previous comments on this thread about how inappropriate it was to receive suggestions on ways to improve his all-grain beer by adding more LME shouldn't have been given this sort of feedback at all - it was, in my opinion, poor judging and not the fault of allowing K&K entries to be judged at the same time as AG beers.

it seems a very complicated issue but I do think that AG/K&K/Mini-Mash/Extract beers should be judged side by side - it seems to me to be a far more effective and objective way of judging beers - how they are then awarded prizes, well I'm not so sure on that...

cheers,

Dan

EDIT - spelling and grammer