Adding to Joe's comments, when I started judging at least a decade ago it was not uncommon for half the enteries to be infected and undrinkable.
To help the entrants score even higher next time, I would like to suggest the single biggest problem that I saw at the weekend was the beers not meeting the requirements of the style. It is not good enough that your been is 'malty', it has to be intense.
Many great beers simply failed to meet the guidelines. When the published guidelines say that a beer should be 'intensly malty' or 'any roast character should be penalised' the judges can only rate your beer against these guidelines.
A large number were entered in the wrong style - I don't know if people just read what is on the outside of the kit or the recipie title. But again, read through the guidelines and check that you and see all the requirements in your entry. If you are not sure what some of the terms mean, try to get a bottle of the commercial example to taste or put the entry in and work through the score sheet comments to help you understand what the judges were looking for.
This is especially so in the specialty class. If your beer is a carrot porter, the judges first need to judge the base beer style (ie Porter) and then the additive (Carrot) and finally assess how well the additive enhances the base beer via the wonderous combination.
Without naming names we saw a fantastic 'x + y in a z' beer and while the x and y were brilliantly done they completely overwhelmed the underlying beer z.
HTH,
Dave
