I figured I would discuss my experience at the Kansas City Biermeisters home brewing contest this weekend, since this thread is all about home brewing.
The categories I was assigned to this weekend were #10 (American Ales) on Friday night and #28 (Specialty Cider) and #18 (Belgian Strong) on Saturday.
There were 51 American Ales to be judged on Friday, and very few of them were American Amber. Most of them were American Pale Ales, including the three best beers from the category, but there were a fair amount of quality American Brown Ales.
I learned a whole lot about judging Cider on Saturday morning, but most of them weren't fitting of the styles and tended to be a bit sweet.
The highlight of my weekend was watching the Melomel or fruit mead judges pass around a cherry mead that was a muddy brown color. It allegedly tasted quite nasty and was deemed to be the worst mead that one of the top mead judges/expert has ever tasted. The looks on their faces after they took a sip of the salty concoction was priceless.

I didn't sit in on the best of show judging, but my friend was one of the highest ranked judges at the contest, and he stated that only three beers could be immediately disqualified from the top prize for aroma flaws and that it was damn near impossible to pick the best over all beer after they got to the top ten.
This sort of surprised me a bit, since there weren't many extremely high scores in any of the categories I helped judge. I guess that means that most of the judges were highly discriminating but fair, and that a lot of home brewers are now making some nearly flawless beer.

Damn. I've only been to one of those events, a stout contest in Madison back about 8 or 9 years ago that my wife's uncle entered (and won). It was a small affair, and pretty cool to watch.

By the by...

A good friend out in Wash state has homebrewed a few times, extract only, and he likes it but isn't uber-serious. He also LOVES heady topper, and told me he'd love to be able to brew something a little more like it vs. the "moose drool" style kits he's done. So I put together a 3 gallon recipe for him, wrote up detailed instructions, bought ingredients, boxed it all up and mailed it out there to him. Recipe:

5# of light DME
0.5# crushed Honey Malt

0.5oz Chinook for 60mins
1oz Centennial & 1oz Cascade for 5mins
2oz Centennial & 1oz Amarillo for 1min
2oz Centennial & 1oz Amarillo for a 20min hop stand
?oz of ? for dry hopping - can't remember what I sent but probably 1 or 2 ounces, probably Amarillo or Simcoe

US-05 yeast, and pre-measured DME for a yeast starter
Oh and a reusable nylon mesh grain / hop bag

It had 2 pages of instructions, and a chart:



He brewed yesterday with his boss, said the yeast starter went well and that he never wanted the smell in his garage to fade. So far so good. Would love for him to be really happy with the results... such an incredibly good guy, would be great to do something nice for him.

I was going to make a big imperial stout with cacao nibs that was going to be aged on oak chips that were soaked in Wild Turkey, but the price of ingredients plus all of the supplies I needed to get was a bit too steep for me. I need to save as much cash as possible for all beer events that I will be travelling to in the next month or two and decided to brew an English Pale Ale instead.

Pitt the Elder English Pale Ale
.5 lbs Simpsons Cara Malt
6 lbs Maris Otter LME
1 lbs Extra Light DME
1 oz of UK Kent Golding Hops (pre-boil)
1 oz of UK Kent Golding Hops at 60 minutes
1 oz of Fuggle Hops at 20 minutes
1 oz of Fuggle Hops at 5 minutes
Burton Water salts
Wyeast 1203 Burton IPA Yeast blended with Danstar Windsor Ale yeast.

Yummy.

I split my last batch at the mash - first runnings turned into 3.5 gallons of 8% stout, second runnings became 3.2 or so gallons of black IPA at around 4.5%. Variety AND more volume... happy.

Finally tried my IPA last night. It...........somewhat resembled beer. There were elements of beer in there for sure but it was all a jumbled mess with no real discernible flavor profile. It was also REAL bitter and I'd wager the alcohol content was somewhere around 7-8%. It was strong.

No clue what I did. I did some trouble-shooting and read things about chlorine, heat levels, etc and started to glaze over.

We're going to give it another go with some other guys who know what they're doing in a couple weeks. Still, not sure I'm being bitten by the bug as of yet. I may just not want to know how the sausage is made and just want it on my plate.

Not sure I can stomach a case of this batch.

If the booze content is way off, then either you had too little water (would've been obvious) or you added too much sugar of some sort.

I guess this was prophetic. You mention water levels being an issue.

So when you say you're wagering the abv is 7-8%, do you not have a hydrometer to measure specific gravity? I thought all the kits come with one. That would tell you a LOT about what's going on in there.

Yeah, I am having a hard time trying to visualize what may have went wrong.
Was it hop bitter or medicinal bitter?
Excessive alcohol can cause bitterness, so that could be the culprit, but boozy beers are usually a bit hot as well.
My second question is, could you really taste the alcohol?
It's odd that there is no discernible flavor profile, since you could usually tell if something was seriously off by a specific taste.
cloying or residual sweetness would lead me to believe that your yeast didn't fully attenuate the beer or you had too much fermentable sugars in the wort for the yeast to handle.
Fusel alcohol taste could mean that you fermented the beer at a higher temperature than advised, where as an overpowering hop bitterness would simply imply that you didn't have the malt backbone to match the level of hops put into the wort, and most likely added too many bittering hops early in the boil.
I'm still perplexed by this one.
I usually only use 2.5 to 3 gallons when I brew an extract batch, and then add two gallons of chilled distilled water to the fermenting bucket before I add the chilled wort to it.

Well, when I hear back from our mutual buddy Porter in Wash State about how the kit I sent him worked, if it went well I'll send you that recipe and detailed instructions, Derris.

Guys, I just know the thing ain't good.

Sounds like we made a myriad of mistakes. I did read that high levels of chlorine in your tap water can cause issues as well.

Pretty sure our wort wasn't exactly chilled as well.

When extract brewing do y'all add water during the process to maintain your water level?


Oh, and Ky, we did have a hydrometer (I think that's what it is) but we forgot to measure it before fermentation.

Southern Nights Brewing (TM) has stumbled out of the gate.

- Adding water while boiling? No. Boil for the full hour, then cover and chill the pot as best you can, then when it's getting down closer to the right temp add water to fill it up to the target final volume (5 gallons?).

- Chlorine in tap water? That's a different off flavor, sorta band-aidy. Might also be one of your many problems but not the most important, yet.

- Wort Not Exactly Chilled: Ruh Roh. If you toss yeast into wort that's over body temperature, many of them will die. It's a funny biological tidbit, but many critters like yeast don't like more than 98.6F specifically. Anywho, they will survive being tossed into 90F wort, but they'll also poop out a ton of bad off flavors. 65-70F is much more like it. I chill to about 70F.

- Spec Grav... Without knowing your starting point, you'll never know how well you did on the boil (fool-proof with extract, but still) and you won't know exact ABV. But taking a final reading when it was flat and not yet bottled still would've been somewhat revealing... remeber to take the temp AND the spec grav at the same time, and write both down! Temp affects it.

Chin up, tiger. it gets a lot better.

I use two gallons of distilled water and somewhere between .5 to 1 gallon of tap water when I extract beer.
I never add water during the boil, since it will mess with your boil temperature.
I pitch the yeast when the wort temperature reaches 78 in the ice bath, since that is high temp for the remaining hot spots in the fermenting pail once the wort has been added to two gallons to chilled distilled water.
I don't use my hydrometer until after it has fermented, since extract OG is pretty stable and can be determined well before your brewing day with various software or calculators on home brewing websites.

Whereas with an all-grain mash, I am checking that shit every half hour with a refractometer to see how it's going...

After a dozen brews, most of which had a 'hmmm' or two and all of which came out ok to excellent I don't think the tap water or even pitching a little warm is killing it (though our most recent, still fermenting, extract, had a very different sg than the recipe suggested, which has not happened before and I have no idea what could be off). Something's weird with your recipe or your volume or your sanitation. Not typical! Usually fun!

Ok, I managed to bottle the split batch today. So that was almost 4 gallons of 7.6% abv stout, and 3.5 gallons of 3.9% abv black IPA (which smelled fantastic, by the way. I late hopped the shit out of it after flameout, so it smells postively stickyicky weed-like in the best way, just full of hop resiny beta acid goodness.)

But I realized something... I've been getting VERY slow carbonations lately, and once I took a temp reading today as part of the abv calcs, I saw that those carboys are at 62F tops. That's pretty cold. Wonder if it's causing some of the slowness.

So I drank Dale's Pale Ale and discussed new hop strains with the author of this book and many other beer related books after we finished judging beer at the KC regional for the NHC. It was pretty cool, in a total beer nerd way.

A little rundown on the categories I helped judge and some of the best homebrew I consumed during the weekend.

Friday Night:
IPA: There were 47 beers in the category, and none of them were particularly memorable. It was a busy night, and I drank a lot afterward, so I may have forgotten an exemplary one. There was one judge, who I don't particularly respect, that gave to beers a high 40 score. They weren't that great and were immediately tossed aside during Best of Show judging for that category.

Saturday AM:
Scottish and Irish Ales: This was my last category for NHC judging last year, and it didn't particularly go well, but this year there were more beers and more quality beers. We had either 23 or 27 in the category this year, and that is about six more than last year. There was a solid Scottish Light, a couple really stellar Irish Red Ales and a damn fine Strong Scottish Ale that I am pretty sure won the best beer of that category.

Saturday PM:
Amber Hybrids: I was hoping to do Light Lagers with Stan Hieronymus, since I have never done that category nor helped judge a category with a guy like him at an event, but I got stuck doing Amber Hybrids, which wasn't a huge loss. There was a really delicious California Common that placed high, but I believe a Dusseldorf Altbier won the title. Interesting fact, Very few people in this country have ever actually drank an authentic Dusseldorf Altbier, and I guess it is even hard to find in Dusseldorf these days.

Saturday PM Final Session:
Fruit Beers: Best category I helped judge all weekend. There were only 13 beers in the flight, and at least four of them were solid 40 point beers. The winning beer was a Golden Ale that taste exactly like Strawberry Shortcake. There was also a delicious Brown Porter that had Cherries that were used to make Cherry Bounce in it and a Berliner Weisse that had Muscat Grapes in it. This session flew by quick and it allowed me to drink the winning beers from the Smoked and Wood Aged category that two of my Lincoln home brew buddies were judging together.

Final thought: If you are entering a contest like the NHC for the first time. Pick a category you frequently brew and/or a beer style that you have won a contest with prior to that point in time. Most people got at most four entries into this event this year, and paid $14 a beer to enter it, so there is no reason not to enter a proven winner or a category you seem to be known for in your home brewing community. Also, make sure your beer is properly carbonated and double check each bottle before you send them off. There are a few people who have clearly entered the wrong style for a certain beer they made, but there seems to be twice as many folks who simply grabbed the wrong bottle from the closet/fridge and mistakenly entered a dark beer in a light category and vice versa.

(wrong bottles entered) holy shit. WHOOPS.

As for alts, is Hannen Alt a "real" alt? I know I had several of those, and a few other varieties with I was there in the 90's. I fucking loved alts, and still wish I could find real ones here more easily.

I had to look at the BJCP style guidelines for the correct answer, but it is considered the second best commercial example of a North German Alt which is a category 7A beer.
The best examples of a category 7C or Dusseldorf Alt beer are Alstadt, Zum Uerige, Im Füchschen, Schumacher, Zum Schlüssel

Probably didn't have any if those. In a nod to good advertising, I remember Hannen because they had a great slogan: Entspannen mit Hannen ( relaxe with Hannen).

So it had only been 4.5 days since bottling last night but I got curious about the black ipa that was made as part of te split mash brew. Holy fuck is it good. Can't believe it has less than 4%. So proud of that beer.

I've been on a bit of a hiatus from checking out this board, but I see that not much has changed.
Today was the AHA Big Brew Day, but the Lincoln Lagers aren't hosting ours until next weekend.
We are going to make a base beer with nearly 100% Pilsner malt. I'm going to make a Belgian Golden Strong Ale/Belgian IPA with the addition of some Extra Light DME and Candi Sugar, and plan on racking it on top of some organic Black Cherry juice and dry hopping it in the secondary.

I missed a full month of brewing with good weather and vacation and shit. So far behind.

I figured this thread could use an update.
I racked the five gallon batch of beer I made for the AHA Big Brew day onto a quart of pure black cherry juice on Sunday and I am dry hopping it with two ounces of UK Bramling Cross Hops. The residual yeasts is currently fermenting the black cherry juice, so I'm hoping it doesn't get too cidery.
I was just happy it didn't have a pellicle growing on it when I opened the primary fermenter on Sunday, since I was a little lax when it came to sanitation do to brewing outside and at another person's house. I need to stick to brewing at my apartment, since I've gotten pretty used to following my own brewing regimen.

I need to use berries again soon. Did that early on, liked it, and never did it again.