Belfast Homebrew Competition

[BrewBilly]

Hi Lads

I have been on the forums general discussion board and seen a load of other clubs doing competitions. So I thought I would kick this of on our board and discuss hosting our own.

Any thoughts? I would suggest starting off with an English IPA?

Cheers
Andy

[matthewdick23]

yous can do it at the brewery one Saturday if yous want

[sub82]

Good plan! We could expand it a bit to include 14A: English IPA, 8: English Pale ales and 11: English brown ales?

[Ciaran]

Sounds like a great idea to me ( said very naively ). 

If you'd be going for an english ale theme you could throw in milds, bitters 4A/4B/4C, or even old ale/barleywine 19A/19B.    Or you could choose a German / Belgian beer theme.  Or where anything is allowed that makes use of roasted dark grains.  Could even do Clone Wars if you could guarantee entries wouldn't just be de-labelled commercial examples?

Either way there's probably a lot to think about

Judging (how many bjcp judges are in the belfast club?)
Venue
Date
Theme
Drop point locations / pick up / shipping
Cold storage
Entry fee
Entry numbers
Prizes
Scoring sheet returns
and probably tonnes more.

[Bazza]

Bring it on, losers!

-Barry

[johnrm]

Not mandatory, but using the BJCP is a good idea as the nationals are being held part in Belfast in 2016.
It's no harm to get a feel for the process.
The final result is not necessarily based on the scores anyway.

[sub82]

Not mandatory, but using the BJCP is a good idea as the nationals are being held part in Belfast in 2016.
It's no harm to get a feel for the process.

+1 - would be good to get the practice/experience.

If you'd be going for an english ale theme you could throw in milds, bitters 4A/4B/4C, or even old ale/barleywine 19A/19B.    Or you could choose a German / Belgian beer theme.  Or where anything is allowed that makes use of roasted dark grains.  Could even do Clone Wars if you could guarantee entries wouldn't just be de-labelled commercial examples?

Re. Theme - an English/belgian/German theme is probably the way to go to maximise entries but I do like the idea of something like clone wars or dark roasted malt beers. Could get some really interest stuff.

[BrewBilly]

Chris those themes are great, they will give us a good spread of categories. I suppose we need to kick this off by proposing some dates.

Venue wise Matthew has offered the brewery - if thats still ok?
Judging - I propose how we did our last competition, nicest beer?

Cheers
Andy

[banjobrew]

Let's keep the foot down on this. Dates? Are we settled on categories? Someone experienced want to draft something up?

[sub82]

Should we go with the English Ales then? Maybe 50-60 entries max. for 3 or 4 sub-categories?

BJCP Categories
1 - 8. English Pale Ales: A. Standard/Ordinary Bitter, B. Special/Best/Premium Bitter, C. Extra Special/Strong Bitter.
2 - 11. English Brown Ales: A. Mild, B. Southern English Brown, C. Northern English Brown
3 - 19. Strong Ales: A. Old Ale, B. English Barleywine
4 - (OPTIONAL) 23. Speciality English Ale

What does everyone think?

Re. judging, it might be good to use the BJCP format, scoresheets, etc.? I think people prefer to get some sort of feedback on their entries?

Re. dates, the Garden County brewers are holding their American Ale competition in May. We'd need to avoid clashing with that and any other annual competitions e.g. Summer session, Rebel brewers, NCB competitions were all held in and around June/July last year. Maybe late August/start of September?

EDIT: We should probably be more flexible on the dates. Is it likely that people will have time to brew over the summer? What would suit everyone else?

[banjobrew]

So maybe aim for around September/October? Not that far away really and saying as we're including barleywines etc.

+1 for BJCP style and English ales.

[Quiet_Man]

Are we going for this?

[sub82]

If enough people are up for getting involved I think it'd be good to run something.

[Quiet_Man]

So, Belfast Homebrewers, and of course those in our nearby more rural communities.....

What do you all think?

[redshift]

Count me in