‘Tis the Season!

If your favorite homebrewer looks stressed out and disappears on the weekends, it’s because this is the beginning of beer competition season. The big one is the National Homebrew Competition (NHC), but there is a bunch of other, smaller but still prestigious competitions that happen right around the same time.
Homebrew competitions are a fraught subject. On the one hand, we want to get honest feedback on our beer because we know that friends and family are unlikely to call our babies ugly. On the other hand, beer judging is a super subjective thing even with the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) guidelines which are sometimes weirdly specific and sometimes weirdly abstract but always changing. And then there are the beer judges … . When you get people with experience who are in it to get brewers honest feedback, it’s always amazing, even when the scores are low. When you get people who are in it just to hear the sound of their own voice, it is infuriating. Unfortunately, there seems to be an even split.
In any case, I started brewing for this year back in July (except for the lambic which takes a year). Normally, when I am brewing for consumption purposes, I bottle in 500 or 750ml bottles but beer competitions want bottles between 10 and 14oz (really they just want 12 oz bottles), so when I am brewing for competition, it usually means I am bottling 12-24 12 oz bottles. The rest I bottle like usual. Competition bottles can’t have any identifying marks so once you have an assortment of beers you want to enter, all bottled in identical bottles and capped with the exact same caps, telling them apart becomes a challenge. I use a white marker on black caps to write a batch number which can easily be wiped off with a little isopropyl alcohol. It’s a process …
In the past, the NHC has allowed each brewer to enter 7 beers and then opened the door to more entries if there were less entries than they anticipated. This year they must be anticipating a lot of brewers because they’ve cut the number of entries per brewer to 4. This is a dilemma for me because when I started planning/brewing for this year, I anticipated the usual numbers and I have 7 beers ready to go with another 3 that will be ready in a two weeks. And I have a cider I want to enter …
Luckily, the Americas Finest City (AFC), another of the big competitions, happens before the NHC and I can enter most of my beers in that one so that I can pick the best four to start with for NHC and then rank the rest for any additional entries beyond the original 4.
The current lineup is as follows:
• Le Crécerelle – Saison (25B)
• Le Sanglier – Belgian Strong Dark AKA Trappist Quad (26D)
• Le Renard – Belgian Blonde (25A)
• L’Hérrison – Orange Lambic (23F)
• Frére Cletus – Biere de Garde (24C)
• Le Corbeau de Printemps – Belgian Single (26A)
• Le Géant de Flandres – Belgian Pale Ale (24B)
• Le Cerf Rouge – Belgian Tripel (26C)
• Le Faison – Witbier (24A)
• Pommes, Pommes, Mûres – Dry French Cider with blackberries (C2B)
And, of course, this is also the time where I start thinking about next year … need to add a lager to the rotation at the very least. It never ends and that’s a good thing.