In Wall Street, Gordon Gecko tells a young Bud Fox that "anything worth doing is worth doing for money." I always think of that line when I'm prepping beer for entry into a competition. Home brewing isn't really about entering competitions and winning awards but submitting your beer for the anonymous evaluation that competitions offer is usually a sound idea. But if you're going to enter, you might as well try to win - to paraphrase Gordon, anything worth entering is worth entering to get a medal.
It's with that in mind that we take a break from recipes and production this week to focus on how you describe your beer for competitions. This isn't necessarily about making your best, but rather presenting your best, and it's worth taking a beat to think about how to maximize your chances of bringing home a nice prize in addition to that valuable feedback at your next competition.
What Judges See
This starts with understanding what we, as beer judges, are actually working with at the table. We get a pile of blank score sheets, some water and crackers, a dump bucket, and a pull sheet. This pull sheet is a list of the beers at our table and in our flight(s), and the only information that is conveyed for most styles is the entry number and the category/sub-category identifiers. So, we'll see, "Entry #422, 9C, Baltic Porter."