Organizing a Small Beer or Session Beer Competition

[Mills]

Hey all, I have started trying to get some more BJCP presence in my portion of Michigan. For that reason, I am thinking about organizing a competition in the Grand Rapids area. My LHBS, Siciliano's Market holds their own single entry competition (which just wrapped up) and they had almost 150 brewers submit beers. My LHBS has said that they would allow me to use their name and shop as the drop off point, and they will keep the beers in cold storage for me. The BN is my club, and I don't know of many other BN'ers in my area. There is the Primetime Brewers in the area that I might be able to get some help from. This is my first time organizing a competition, but I am a certified judge and have started helping as a judge coordinator for other competitions.

With all of that out of the way, I am thinking of having this competition be a small beer or session beer competition. I have seen strong ale competitions and the like, so I thought this might be a novel way to go. It would also limit the potential number of entries due to the fact that there will be less categories to enter.

What do all of you think about this concept? Is there any experience out there with this type of competition? Any and all feedback will be welcomed.

Thanks,

Mills

[speed]

i think that would work, there are too many extreme beers out there in competitions.

[thatguy314]

I like the idea a lot.

A lot of these comps have an "imperial anything" category.

You should include an un-perial anything category: where people could enter a lower alcohol saison or bock, or a belgian single. I mean that's really just cat 16e or 23 specialty beers, but I like calling it "un-perial"

[drewbage1847]

We did an AHA Club Only a few years ago about that. The only rule was "beer had to be under 1.040" (I think) and we ran from there. Tell us the style and we'll judge it as such.

Next year's Doug King Memorial will probably have a "Session Beer" category in addition to the "Imperial Anything" category.

[BDawg]

A couple years ago, Cascade Brewer's Guild (MBrown's club) held an X-Brew competiion. While it was open to all styles, there was a pair of specialty categories for "Extreme" beers, in both directions. Basically any style could be made Imperial (>1.075) or Small (<1.040) and be entered in this category.

As an example, a "Small American Pale Ale" would be basically an APA brewed down to Ordinary Bitter specs, except still using American hops, yeast, etc.

Neat concept, and some good beers came out of it.

Good luck with this!

[BlueLoon]

Our club had our first comp this year and we also wanted to narrow the styles. We came up with a Winter Darkness theme of beer styles 20+ srm and then we had to categories. below 1060 og and 1060 og and above. We had 17 entries and it took 3 judges about 4 hours to judge them all. We had 2 stewards also which were great to have. Overall it went well and we only had one complaint about the 20+ srm but he could have brewed a schwartz beer if he really wanted to. It was a lot more work to organize and execute than I thought.