Once upon a time I set out to make a great Czech Pilsner.
I failed. Dramatically. And consistently. I have exactly one bronze medal in the category, despite more than ten attempts at brewing it. It never did poorly, but it just couldn’t break through.
Not much of a story, really, but what’s interesting is what came out of it: a fantastic beer for another category. Because what was really funny was that although I did every last thing I could think of to get my Czech Pils recipe to work and start bringing in the big numbers in competitions, it always—always—outperformed like crazy when I dropped a couple of bottles of it into the Pre-Prohibition Lager (previously, Classic American Pilsner) category. It got even better when I changed up the hops to match its new New World character, dropping the Saaz and swapping in an American Hallertau cousin. The resulting recipe became one of my best-scoring and most-popular beers, with my highest average score (40.1/50) and second-highest individual score (45/50).