Poll: HBT Competition Winners - Care to share your secrets?

I know the winning recipes have been posted, but I thought it might be interesting to see the processes that the winners in the recent competition use. We read about different brewing techniques on here every day. It would be nice to see how the winning brewers actually brew their award-winning beers. The poll options only allow 10 poll items, so I tried to stick to the most universal processes.

for aeration, i let the wort fall and splash into the fementer in a small stream until i creates a thick foamy head. there was no "other" option in your poll.

Dogphish said:

for aeration, i let the wort fall and splash into the fementer in a small stream until i creates a thick foamy head. there was no "other" option in your poll.

Click to expand...

Good point. I need to edit the poll. I guess that would fit best under agitation.

Edit: I can't edit the poll.

I'm going to hazard a guess and say that the two most important aspects of getting competition winning beer is proper pitching rates and adequate temperature control during fermentation...

Great idea on the poll. I'm interested to see the results come in.

I second the notion of temperature control and pitching rates as essential.

But I think a lot of it is good technique throughout a batch. Did you calculate everything... correct mash temp and sparge temp, good rolling boils, correct timing and measurements of hops, storage of any and all things, proper cleaning and sterilization, adequate time in the fermenter/maturation, proper amounts of priming sugar, proper bottle conditioning temperatures, etc, etc. Mess up on one step and it could affect the result.

IMHO you need to watch someone do any entire batch to really appreciate what they do different from other brewers. But then again, that would be pretty boring to watch...

And the poll seems like it will be much more satisfying.