Florida Homebrew competition- fruit in an IPA?

[Allenjoseph5]

I'm entering my first Homebrew competition soon. It's an IPA only competition. My question is if an IPA that had fruit added to the secondary can still be entered as an IPA under BJCP guidelines? I know there's a fruit beer category, but this being an IPA only competition, I can't enter it as a fruit beer. The beer has loads of hops and definitely is an IPA. I'm just wondering if the addition of fruit disqualifies it from falling in the IPA category. Thanks for any help.

 

[jekeane]

It mostly should be entered as a fruit beer, mostly. I say mostly because if you are adding fruit that is mimicked by the hops you chose then you could just forgo mentioning you added fruit. For example you use any number of citrussy grapefruity hops and added the corresponding fruits. If you added say watermelon or raspberry you would have a much harder sell...

In the end it is up to the judge to decide whether your fruit addition whether listed or not removes the beer from their interpretation of the bjcp guidelines.

 

[m00ps]

Depends on how prevalent the fruit flavor is. Could a blind taste test easily pick out the fruit addition (like grapefruit sculpin?) or does it kinda just add to the hop flavors a bit (like New Belgium citradellic)

There's like eleventy breweries that jumped on the bandwagon after grapefruit sculpin was voted best new beer by some publication or something the year it came out. I've seen everything from tangerine to mango, watermelon to pineapple. Im sure itll be a new "Specialty IPA" category soon

 

[Allenjoseph5]

Thanks for the help. Pineapple was what I added to it. It's not overwhelming, but it's definitely there. I only added fruit to half the batch, so I'll still have something to enter regardless. I was just hoping to enter both versions. I'm wondering if I would be able to enter it as a fruit beer as long as I declare the base beer is an IPA, per BJCP guidelines. I'm just not sure if that would be permissible under the contest's rules. They are a little vague. I'll see if I can get any more clarity from the organizers (even though the rules state that they won't help).