Entering First Competition: Which Category?

Hey guys! I crafted my first recipe on here last month with the help of some of the more experienced home brewers in the recipe section, and I had home brew success!

I want to enter my beer into a competition to get some good honest constructive criticism to help me out in the future.

Recipie:

Two Problems Though:

A)
I am not sure what category to enter my beer into, there are three that I am looking at and they each have some draw-backs.

-Weizen: I don't use German base malt or noble hops although challenger imparts a spicy character , and I fall short of 50% wheat. However, the "hefe" yeast flavor is pretty spot on.

-American Wheat: I have to much yeast character for an American Wheat beer, and I am to dark as well.

-Specialty: Honestly, the only thing that I don't like about this category is that it is kinda the hodge podge of "everything else", and I really don't know how my beer would reviewed without something concrete to compare it to. Someone with some experience could help me out with the details of this.

B)
I really don't know a good competition to enter, I want to find one that is known to have judges that are really good for giving plenty of constructive feed back, this is the second thing that I need advice on.

Honest advice, design a beer based on the style guidelines and submit that. I'm not sure you are going to get the commentary you want (aside from whether or not there are obvious flaws) by shoehorning something into a category and hoping for the best.

While the beer may be great, compete tuition is to style and if the beer does not match style you get dinged. Period.

Specialty is the only category you could enter this in and while there is a lot of room in the category you will still get good constructive feedback on your beer which is well worth the entry

As stated, if you want to be in a specific category then You need to brew a beer that meets the criteria

Agree with all the posts above. The beers in a BJCP sanctioned competition are going to be compared to the BJCP style guidelines. You might have a delicious beer but if it doesn't find the guidelines, then it will likely not score very well. You could, alternatively, try to find a competition not using the BJCP guidelines and see how it does.

I see, since there is a general agreement that submitting the beer to a competition in any category other than specialty , does anyone know of any good competitions for beers in the specialty category, kind of a competition that is well suited for "everything else" ? If the answer to that is 'nay' then I don't mind just waiting till next time.

jlangfo5 said:

I see, since there is a general agreement that submitting the beer to a competition in any category other than specialty , does anyone know of any good competitions for beers in the specialty category, kind of a competition that is well suited for "everything else" ? If the answer to that is 'nay' then I don't mind just waiting till next time.

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I can't think of any "specialty only" competitions, although they probably have some non-BJCP competitions out there that might work for you.

As an example, a homebrew club I'm involved in has a Dead of the Winter Stout Competition each year. It is NOT BJCP, and extra points are awarded for creativity. It's fun, and there are some crazy entries.

Still, if you want good honest feedback on a beer, the BJCP guidelines seem to be the best way to judge. Since your beer is out of style for all categories though, it won't score well in any of them. And the feedback may not be helpful, since most of the feedback will state "not to style in a hefeweizen".

I can't think of any way to get good feedback formally, but if you found a judge who would do it informally, then you'd still get feedback. I'm not offering, as I'm overwhelmed with requests for doing a little of that informally from people on the forum already, but that's one way to get honest and helpful feedback from experienced brewers/judges.

if you cant find a competition, look into a local homebrew club, there's sure to be some judges in there that could give you some feedback.

http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/pages/directories/find-a-club