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**Coastarine** · 09-16-2008, 10:41 PM

As my beers have begun to improve, I'm starting to look for competitions to enter, and I'm actually finding this to be a difficult task.

I realized as I was thinking about this that we have a big enough community here that we could have our own HBT competition. Has this been done/attempted? Obviously we'd have to pick a place and people would have to judge. If we have some BJCP cert judges we could have samples going to each or just divide them by category. If we don't really have many, the judging could just take place wherever we have a significant concentration of HBT'ers. Naturally it would have to be executed IAW HBT swap rules (paying members only, etc). We could limit the categories to be judged if participation would be small, or just pick two categories. We could pre-register entries if it would help in planning the judging.

What does everyone think?

**the_bird** · 09-16-2008, 10:57 PM

We thought about it a year or two back, but the consensus at least at the time was:

1. Most people hate competitions (at least those with a lot of experience) and view them as too arbitrary

2. The logistics were pretty tough to deal with

3. We have a handful of trained judges around, but not that many, and trying to get a group of them together to do a true judging was going to be really tough

4. Most people were interested in getting feedback on their beers, but a substantial number weren't interested in brewing "to style," which is pretty much the only fair way to judge a comp. Most people judge their own beer based on whether they LIKE it or not (the *right* way to judge, IMHO

), but that's really impossible to evaluate fairly in a competition setting. WAY too subjective.