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Sorry, i saw your reply after posting mine. A black tripel entered as a regular tripel is a bad idea. You should still get feedback, provided the judges are good, but I think it's unlikely that you would place.

Make sure you take a close look at the rules for the competitions you plan to enter. It is not uncommon to be able to enter more than one beer into specialty categories provided they are clearly not the same beer.

Schokie - you're right about the Cal Ale strains (at least some of them, depending on who you ask, apparently) being able to ferment well even down on the 50s, but the temp range of that strain is exceptional, in my opinion. As JohnSand pointed out, a bucket or carboy sitting on the cold...

You'll usually want to keep your fermentation temp within the recommended range of the yeast. Yes, fermentation will generate some heat, but the fermenting beer needs to be warm enough for the yeast to really get going. Mid-60s in your dining room would be preferable to 50s, but does not sound...

I'm not a pro, but if it is a straight up, BJCP style guideline IPA-only competition, then yes, adding fruit, spices or herbs is likely to be a bad idea. It will no doubt set your beer apart, but judges will almost certainly pick up on those flavors and probably say it's out of style. If...

PS - I know you were doing as instructed on the recipe sheet. This is just what I'd suggest trying next time.

I assume that the wine yeast would be for bottling. The Chimay yeast should plow through the fermentables without much trouble. If you let it sit to condition for a while, adding a fresh pitch of yeast at bottling will ensure you get good carbonation in the bottles. It should be pretty...

The football game I'm watching on TV gets to the end and a couple players dump a big orange cooler full of Gatorade on the coach. My 6-year old sits up and says, "Papa! What are those guys doing? They just dumped their whole bucket of beer on that guy!" It took a few seconds before I made...

While Beersmith on my desktop is my go-to, I use BrewBot for a lot of initial quick and dirty recipe design. It has a quite a few calculators, tools, and references built in that can be handy on brew day and beyond. I don't know if there is an Android version of it.

Good, Beersmith makes it easy to calculate volumes. If your volumes are correct, then I'm with these guys that it's likely to be the crush. I bought a mill soon after going to all-grain, and have noticed my crush to be much more consistent than friends' grain milled at the shop. Once I had...

When you add your sparge water, are you calculating how much you need to add so you are not leaving any (or at least not much) behind in your mash tun? ...or are you adding more sparge water than you need and only running off until you hit your target volume?