Homebrew competitions reward the least exciting thing in the hobby, which is a beer that matches a written description and has nothing wrong with it, rather than the most ambitious one on the table. A judge is handed a bottle, a style description with target ranges for strength, colour and bitterness, and a score sheet, and the beer is measured against that description instead of against your friends' opinions of it. That is why the brewers who place year after year are usually not the ones with the wildest recipes but the ones whose process produces the same beer twice.
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What Judges Are Actually Scoring
- Read the comments rather than the number, because the criticism that repeats across more than one sheet is the fault in your process.
- Keep a brew log with the real numbers in it, since a recipe printed from a website cannot be repeated and a log can.
- Register in the category that describes the beer, because a good beer entered in the wrong style is scored as a bad one.
- Send identical bottles filled to the same level, since sediment and labels both count against you before the beer is tasted.
How an Entry Is Actually Judged
You bottle the beer, register it in a style category and hand it in, and the competition strips your identity from it, so the judge sees a category number, the name you chose for the beer and nothing that tells them who made it. Commercial labels and printed caps have to come off for that reason, and a bottle that still shows a brewery's logo is a problem before the beer is ever tasted. Judges then work through a flight of related beers at a table, usually a panel of two or three, pouring each sample into a clean glass and scoring appearance, aroma, flavour, mouthfeel and an overall impression.
Each beer leaves the table with a score out of a possible fifty and written comments, and the panel also ranks the best beers in front of them to send forward to a final round, which is where the flight winners and the event's top honours are decided. Medals are awarded on score bands rather than on beating a named rival, so a very good beer in a strong flight still gets the score it earned, and a mediocre beer does not get rescued by a weak table. The reference document most competitions in North America judge against is published by the Beer Judge Certification Program, and reading the entry for the style you intend to brew is the cheapest preparation available to you.
Style Accuracy Is What the Score Measures
The style description gives numbers, and they are the reason the technical decisions on brew day matter to a judge. Original gravity and final gravity set the alcohol and the residual body, mash temperature decides how much of the sugar the yeast is able to eat, and colour comes from the grain bill. A judge who writes that a beer is out of style is almost never complaining about the recipe you chose; they are describing a gap between the beer in the glass and the range printed on the sheet, and that gap usually traces back to one of the levers below.
| What the judge writes | The decision behind it | Where to change it |
|---|---|---|
| Too sweet and full for the style | A mash held at the warm end of the 148 to 158°F (64 to 70°C) range leaves sugars the yeast cannot eat | Drop the mash a few degrees for a drier, lighter-bodied beer |
| Thin and watery where body was expected | A cool mash, heavy adjunct use or an over-long sparge diluting the wort | Raise the mash temperature slightly and stop the sparge earlier |
| Harsh, astringent finish | Sparge water running alkaline, or sparging until the runnings are nearly water | Keep sparge water below about pH 6 and stop on gravity rather than on volume |
| Hazy in a style that should be brilliant | Recirculation cut short, protein from wheat or oats, or a batch packaged before it settled | Recirculate the runoff until it runs clear and give the beer time in the bottle |
| Bitterness above or below the style | Where the hop additions sit in the boil | Move additions earlier for bitterness or into the last minutes for aroma |
| Alcohol short of the stated range | A grain bill or extract charge that started lower than the guideline's original gravity | Measure the starting gravity and correct the bill before the boil, not after |
Two numbers are worth carrying around as defaults, because they explain a great deal of the difference between a good batch and a repeatable one: mash pH in the 5.2 to 5.6 range, which is where the malt enzymes work best and where the beer tastes cleanest, and a mash thickness of roughly 1.25 to 1.5 quarts of water per pound of grain, which is about 2.5 to 3 litres per kilogram. Neither figure is a rule, and both belong in your notes so that the next entry is the same beer as this one.
The Faults Judges Are Listening For
Judges are trained on a short list of fault characters, and most of them are avoidable with process rather than with ingredients. This is the list that costs homebrewers the most points, along with what usually causes it.
- Buttery or butterscotch character from diacetyl, which is a normal intermediate that a beer still holds when it is bottled too early or fermented too cold for the yeast to finish cleaning it up.
- Canned corn or cooked vegetable, called dimethyl sulfide or DMS, which comes from a boil that was too short or too covered, or from wort that was left to cool slowly for hours.
- Green apple, called acetaldehyde, which is a sign of beer that has not had time to mature or of a fermentation that was interrupted and then packaged.
- Sherry, papery or cardboard notes, which are oxidation, and on a competition beer they almost always happened on the way from the fermenter into the bottle.
- Skunk, which is light reacting with hops, and it arrives from clear or green bottles on a counter rather than from anything you did in the kettle.
- Clove, smoke or band-aid phenolics, which are either the yeast strain doing what that strain does or a wild yeast that came in on a surface nobody sanitized.
- Medicinal or plastic character, which points to chlorine in the brewing water reacting with organisms, and it is fixed with filtered or conditioned water and better sanitation.
- Harsh alcohol warmth and solvent notes, which come from a warm, uncontrolled fermentation and from pitching too little yeast into a strong wort.
Consistency Is the Skill That Places
Entering a beer you have only made once is a wager on a single afternoon, and the entry that improves your score next season is the one you can reproduce. That means a log with the numbers in it rather than a recipe printed from a website: the mash temperature you actually held, the starting and finishing gravities, the grain-to-water ratio, the hop additions with their times, the fermentation temperature by day, and the date you packaged. A brew day that takes six to eight hours is easy to remember in outline and impossible to repeat accurately, and the details you left out are the ones that changed the beer.
The other half of consistency is restraint in the recipe. A beer built on five unusual ingredients is harder to place than a well-executed version of one style, because every addition has to land in the glass the way you imagined it and the judge is scoring the sum of them. Enter the beer you can describe in the language of the style guideline, and keep the experiments for a batch you are not paying to have judged.
Packaging an Entry Well
The beer arrives in the judge's glass before the judge forms an opinion of it, so the mechanical details matter more than they feel they should. Use identical bottles for one entry, filled to the same level, free of labels and of any residue inside, and give bottle-conditioned beer the full two weeks at room temperature it needs before the entry deadline rather than bottling the week it is due. Pour carefully when you fill, since sediment in the last bottle of a six is a defect the judge cannot separate from the beer, and keep entries cool and dark on the way there, because a case in a hot car has already begun to taste like cardboard before anyone opens it.
Freshness is a style question. Hop aroma fades within weeks, so a pale ale entered three months after brewing is being judged as a different beer from the one you made, while a roasty, higher-alcohol ale usually benefits from that same month. Read the style description for the hint about age, and time the brew so the beer reaches the table in the condition the style expects.
What to Do With the Score Sheet
The number is the least useful thing on the page. Judges disagree, tables are harsh or generous, and a beer can sit near the top of one event's scoring and place nowhere at another without changing between the two, so treat any single score as one noisy sample. The comments are the reason to enter, and the pattern to look for is the criticism that appears on more than one sheet, because that is the fault in your process rather than a judge's preference. If one judge mentions a little haze and two more describe the finish as thin, you have something to change, and you should change one of those things and enter the beer again.
Before You Pay for an Entry
- Enter a club competition first, because it costs less, the feedback is more personal and you learn how a score sheet reads before a large event decides anything about your brewing.
- Read the entry rules for the number and size of bottles, the deadline and the fee, since every competition sets its own and a late or wrongly bottled entry is thrown out untasted.
- Brew the style guideline before you brew the recipe, and check that your gravity, colour and bitterness targets sit inside the printed ranges.
- Register in the category that actually describes the beer, because a well-made beer entered in the wrong style is scored as a badly made one in the right style.
- Keep your batch notes with the entry, since some events let you attach a note to the judges about unusual ingredients, and a judge can only tell you whether the beer worked if they know what you were aiming at.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I have to brew all-grain to place in a competition?
No, and the judge is scoring the beer in the glass rather than the method that produced it. All-grain brewing does give you direct control over the sugar profile, the body and the clarity of the wort, which are exactly the things that go wrong at the edges of a style, so it makes hitting a target easier and it is why most placing beers are all-grain. Extract brewers who manage fermentation temperature, water and freshness place beers too, and the fault list above does not care which route you took.
What style should I enter for the first time?
Enter the style you already brew well, and if that leaves several options, the darker and malt-driven ales are more forgiving of a beginner's process, because roasted malt and caramel sweetness hold up in a bottle for months and the style does not rest on an aroma that fades over a few weeks in the case. Delicate pale lagers and intensely hop-aromatic pale ales are the hardest first entries, since both styles are judged on freshness and cleanliness, and small errors in either are obvious to a trained palate long before the entry deadline.
How many bottles does one competition entry need?
Six bottles per entry is the common expectation, and the size the competition wants is printed in its entry rules along with whether they prefer 12 ounce or 16 ounce, or larger bottles for styles that are served differently. Send more than the minimum only if the rules ask for it, and make sure every bottle in the entry came from the same batch and the same case, because a judge who gets two pours from a well-conditioned bottle and one from a flat one has nothing to score but their disagreement.
Is it worth entering if I do not win anything?
Yes, because the written comments are the only structured feedback most homebrewers ever get on a beer they cannot explain to anyone. A medal is a noisy outcome that depends on which flight you landed in and how generous the table was, while a sheet that says the finish is thin and the carbonation is low tells you what to change in the next batch, which is worth more than the entry fee even when nothing is awarded.
Can I enter a beer I did not brew myself?
No, the requirement is that the entrant brewed the beer, and entering someone else's batch is the one rule with no grey area in it. Brewing a batch together with another homebrewer is a different situation, and competitions handle group batches in different ways, so read the entry rules and name whoever made it rather than guessing at what the event expects.
Enter the Boring Version First
The fastest route to a better score is not a more interesting recipe. It is a clean fermentation held at a steady temperature, a mash and sparge you measured rather than estimated, a bottling day where the beer did not splash, and a log that lets you make the same beer again in six weeks. Do those four things and put a well-executed ordinary ale in front of a judge, and the comments you get back will tell you precisely which of them still needs work.
