BetterBeerBlog

I had the opportunity to judge a preliminary round for the California State Homebrew Competition, better known in homebrew circles as Stern Grove, at Firehouse Brewery & Grill last night. Stern Grove holds a special place in many a homebrewer’s and BJCP judge’s heart for a variety of reasons. It is one of the oldest homebrew competitions in California. Stern Grove also signals the end of homebrew competition season. It is one of the last, if not the last, homebrew competition in California.

Judging Stern Grove is a bit of a departure from your typical BJCP/AHA sanctioned event. The biggest difference is the way the beers are scored. In a typical homebrew competition, beers are judged against a 50 point scale. Beers are evaluated according to aroma, appearance, flavor, mouthfeel and overall impression. Because the competition has been around for so long, Stern Grove has it’s own competition forms. They’re not really trying to be different from your typical BJCP event more than they’ve been grandfathered in.

The Stern Grove worksheets are evaluated on a 20 point scale. This poses a slight conversion issue for judges in the sense that a point given or taken away from a Stern Grove worksheet will have a greater impact than your typical BJCP score sheet. That being said, it takes a little bit getting used to.

Most homebrew competitions will have preliminary rounds. This allows the judges to cull the field of entries, weeding out the stronger ones from the entries that need a little more work. By the time the final rounds of judging at Stern Grove actually takes place, the majority of the beers there will be pretty good.

In last night’s preliminary round, we had the opportunity to judge the wheat beer category. There were 3 judging groups. Two of the groups had 3 judges while the final group had only 2. Unlike other preliminary rounds I’ve judged at, we actually had 2 stewards to help us out. Big thanks goes stewards Bobby and Anthony for keeping things fluid.

There were a few issues that kept cropping up as the night wore on. Weizen beers are supposed to be lighter, effervescent, refreshing and flavorful. Yeast character needs to be the dominant, yet balanced, character in a weizen beer. Just about all the entries we tried were lacking banana esters and clove phenolics. In their place were generic fruit esters slightly reminiscent of Belgian yeasts while the phenolic character was equally generic and varied from spicy to plastic/band-aid. Body was an issue as well as many beers were watery while other samples were undercarbonated. Surprisingly a few beers were clear and lacked the “mit hefe” cloudiness one would expect from the style.

To bring out more of the weizen yeast character, start with a viable weizen strain of yeast and then ferment one’s beers at a slightly higher temperature (70º F +). Having a thin body in a hefeweizen is unusual since the addition of wheat malt is usually the prescription for thickening up a beer’s body. For the hefeweizen though, the brewer can implement a decoction mash to both thicken up the body and darken the beer slightly to get a gold color. Wheat malt will also help with head retention. When bottling beers, make sure to measure out one’s priming sugar correctly. Weizen beers are noted for their effervescent character and a flat beer is not a good sign. Lastly, always be mindful of one’s sanitation.

It was good to get back on the beer judging horse. It had been at least 6 months or so since my last competition. I may have been a little rusty with filling out score sheets and with my descriptions but my palette’s been okay. For whatever reason, I haven’t been all that interested in judging competitions this year. You could probably count on one hand how many competitions I’ve judged. What’s ironic is that I received my BJCP exam results (I retook the tasting portion of the exam) and I moved up a rank. There’s always next year.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 9:05 am and is filed under BJCP, Competitions, Craft Beer, Homebrew. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.