Lemon rosemary ale: Which category should I enter it in?

Spiced/herb/vegetable beer or specialty beer? And why?

 

Because the rosemary will likely be the dominant flavor.

 

So I take it you mean 21A? Both the rosemary and lemon come through to me. Does that matter?

 

You can do it in both. I would do spiced/herb. Specialty tend to be bigger beers, in my experience. Those categories are both weird and hard to win, and usually leave me mad. Mostly because they say my explanations of the beers don't match. Which is ridiculous. I get good scores, but if I brewed that beer they'd likely say, "tastes more like lime and sage." Nevermind jerks, I'll keep the bottles for myself.

 

Ha! I can see how judges could piss a brewer off in that category. Heck, I've only entered a few comps so far and I have gotten some odd/frustrating feedback. Anyway, thanks for the input. It'll definitely go into spiced/herb category. Cheers!

 

I would go with spice/herb/vegetable if the predominant flavor is the spice. Also don't forget to list the base style.

 

Yeah, half the time I get dinged for base style. Good luck. By the way, how much rosemary did you use? Did you do the whole stem and all? I'm about to do a rosemary pale ale.

 

My base style was an American Wheat. For a 5 gallon batch I used two whole sprigs, about 4 inches long, at flameout, stem and all, along with zest of one lemon. Let it steep for about 10 mins with heat off, then dropped the immersion chiller in. Rosemary is quite pungent, and this amount comes through in the beer without overwhelming it.

 

I forget all the categories,but I thought it could be concidered a gruit as well?...

 

Possibly. It would still go in 21A or 23, though. I don't know much about gruit, but I think it uses herbs as the primary bittering agent, in lieu of hops. I used it as an additional layer.

 

Ah,ok. I wasn't sure if you'd used hop bittering or straight herb & lemon.

 

That beer would go into specialty because it is a fruit AND a spice.


Cheers

 

Enter it into both! It would be fairly curious to see how the comments compared between each entry...if this were a larger competition, it would be unlikely the same judges would be tasting both categories...