SpanishCastleAle said:
What I mean is, often there will be several beers in a flight that all are within guidelines and have no glaring flaws. But they won't be equivalent in terms of how good overall they are.
You've probably seen it in commercial beers you've had. Pick several commercial, say Pale Ales, that all are within the guidelines and have no real flaws. Surely you'll like certain examples over others and would have scored them differently if you were judging them.
This. There's "perfectly to style" and then there's "perfectly to style AND tastes amazing". With the increasing seriousness with which homebrewers take this "hobby", MANY beers these days have no problem fitting the style. Just look at your own post - you provided evidence of your beer's "perfection" in the form of the rigorousness of your process, and it was actually a good idea, since most of us here are able to recognize that your process is airtight, and that there's really nothing that can be improved upon in order to make the beer even more to style. But the fact that we can all agree it's airtight demonstrates that the process of making a dry stout to style is well-known, and anybody with the necessary equipment can probably brew a TECHNICALLY flawless stout. But competitions are useless if everybody's being handed perfect scores, so it only makes sense for the scoring to differentiate beers in the only way that still remains possible.
In fact, 29 is a pretty decent score, ESPECIALLY for a more ho-hum style such as dry stout. I've seen similarly unexciting styles - such as cream ale, which is not exactly lacking entrants most of the time - win first in the category, with mid-high 20's. Don't think of it as a percentage grade like you may have received in school... there's absolutely no correlation. Dry stouts simply don't see the same scores that the top RIS'es will, but that's fine, because you're not really competing against RIS'es. And if you ARE in a competition that lumps everything together in their broader categories, a dry stout probably just isn't the best idea if you're in it to win it - although they typically only group the subcategories together like that in smaller comps where there just aren't enough entrants to have 80+ categories, so your chances aren't TOO bad.
If your goal is to brew to style, then the comments are all you need, and they sound pretty validating to me. You don't need the score to ALSO tell you that, and as a somewhat more subjective metric, it really doesn't tell you that as well anyways.
Your process is clearly nailed down, so if the comments are not enough for you and you really want to COMPETE, then it's probably time to start focusing on the art, in addition to the science. If even only half the beers manage to stay within the guidelines (which is no longer even close to the case these days), then you're still only in the middle of the pack, unless you brew something that tastes better than all the other, equally perfect beers in your category.
Many competition brewers nowadays feel that it's almost necessary to brew MOST styles a big as the guidelines will allow, because unless you manage to be first in the flight, you can all but guarantee that the *******(es) before you are already assaulting the judges' palates. So you are right about the bias towards bigger beers, but I don't think it lends itself to style creep. Competition beers are brewed to previously defined guidelines - not the other way around. And if you look at the BJCP guidelines, over the revisions that have taken place, they have actually mostly been tightened up, often with a much more narrow range of OG's, and, from what I've seen, nearly always LOWERING the upper limit from earlier guidelines, with the exceptions mostly being with beers that are known for being at the extremes of OG, both high and low.
And just a note about the comment you made about astringency being acceptable in a dry stout, yes, that's true. It doesn't automatically make the assessment invalid though. Sometimes the astringency is of an incorrect character, as would be the case with hop astringency. In a dry stout though, that's extremely unlikely. What's far more possible is that a judge finds the astringency to be excessive, even for the style. Very few characteristics permitted in a given style are considered acceptable without any limits - at some point, astringency DOES become a fault even in a dry stout. Of course, the judge could have also been very wrong (they are, after all, only human), but the observation still shouldn't be dismissed so offhandedly simply because the guidelines allow for the characteristic.
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