The Indianola Brewing Cooperative

The co-op had a good hop year (or at least half of us did).

I’ve posted a few comments about the 2008 Kitsap County Fair homebrew competition over at the West Sound Brewers website. Feel free to read the rest of them here.

I started this fire, so I think it’s appropriate that I add a more verbose response. I’ve contemplated going to a WSB meeting for a while now. I admit it, I’m a beer geek and I thought it would be interesting to talk to other beer geeks. I’ve always been weary of organizations like the WSB. From past experience most of them are just mutual appreciation societies (good ol’ boy clubs). I thought that entering the Kitsap County Fair Homebrew competition would be a good way to meet the WSB and find out what you were like.

The competition did give me some exposure to the WSB, and I must admit, I am not impressed. There were strong indicators of impropriety during the judging and the overall quality of the judging was mediocre at best.

Let’s discuss the appearance of impropriety. The first rule in integrity management is not to put yourself in a situation where someone has cause to question your integrity. This is obviously something the WSB has failed miserably at. Both best in class winners submitted at least one Ale to the competition and both best in class winners judged other Ales. There is no way to prove that something improper happened during the judging. There are also strong reasons for an outsider to suspect that there could have been improprieties and there is no way to disprove them. In the future, if you don’t want people to question the integrity of your competition and the judges involved in it, I would take strong measures to ensure no one has an cause to do so.

On the quality of the judging:
To be completely honest, I did fairly good in the judging in terms of raw score. Unfortunately a numerical score doesn’t really help you brew better beer – comments help you brew better beer (even the check boxes help). Now I admit, I’m not a big fan of the BJCP or their style guidelines and I don’t believe that a person has to be rated by the BJCP in order to be a good beer judge. A person just needs to be familiar with what they are judging, able to read and understand basic guidelines, and provide a reasonable amount of pertinent feedback on the score they assigned. I should also add that the judging in this competition wasn’t all bad. There was at least one judge (Alan Moum) who left great and insightful comments. Thanks Alan, it was greatly appreciated. There was also one judge (Brad Ginn) who probably shouldn’t have bothered to use a score sheet . This score sheet (http://indianolabrew.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/bad_review.jpg) is basically useless. There are a total of four words of feedback on it, and only in the categories where I had a perfect or near perfect score. In the areas where most (around 60%) of my points were deducted, there was no feedback, whatsoever. If I submit my beer for judging, then the least a judge can do is to provide feedback in the area were points are being deducted.

I’ve heard twice now that to resolve issues like this that I should become more involved in the WSB. I have no desire to be part of a “good ol’ boys network” and as long as the WSB appears to behave like one, I’ll continue to have no desire to have anything to do with the WSB. How do you appear not to be a “good ol’ boys network” you ask? For starters, the next time you sponsor or run a competition you should do at least the following.

1. Make the rules and judging criteria publicly available ahead of time.
2. Ensure that the people judging the competition will not be competing in it.
3. Require the judges to provided ample and adequate feedback on the beer that they are judging. If someone receives a bad score, there should be enough comments or feedback on his/her sheet that he or she understands why that score was given.

-Drew

After brewing with oatmeal, and wheat, I’m going back to the false bottom – but not just the false bottom. I’m going with the “belt and suspenders” approach and am now using both the false bottom and the stainless steel manifold. We’ll see how it goes.

The reason I’m not a member of the West Sound Brewers is very simple – they are corrupt (or at least they appear that way).

 
How do I know this? It’s not difficult to figure out. The two people who won “Best in class awards” in the 2008 Kitsap county fair homebrew competition were also judges in the competition.

Mark Hood, who judged my beers (all Ales), won the “Best of Class: Lager/Co Superintendent’s Award”. Mark also submitted a Belgian Specialty Ale for which he took second place. Care to guess who took first place? John Altman.

John is the second suspect judge. John won the “Best of Class: Ale/Best of Show” for his Belgian Blond Ale. He was also one of the judges that scored my American Brown Ale (which also won in it’s category).

Should someone be entering (and winning) the same competition in which he is a judge? I don’t think so! If it wasn’t a rigged competition, the West Sound Brewers worked very hard to make it look like it was.

I’ve never been one for entering beer competitions. I really don’t care if people I don’t know like my beer and on top of that, I generally don’t brew to BJCP style guidelines. Despite that, I did enter three beers into the Kitsap county fair. The following is one of my score sheets from the competition.

In the fields where I had perfect or near perfect scores, Brad was so kind as to write two words: “good clarity” and “med body” (med isn’t actually a word, its the abbreviation of a word, but I’ll let that slide). In the Aroma field, where Brad deducted nearly 60% of the possible points, Brad didn’t say anything.

Brad Ginn, I don’t know what your day job is, but I certainly hope you are better at it than you are at judging beer.

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

– Benjamin Franklin

The world is a really fucked up place and I’m in it. Stated while consuming a very nice american brown.  SBIV aka Becker

“Making light lager beer is like going to the beach in a thong. You better have all your parts in place or it’s going to be ugly.” –Tom Dargan, brewer for the Gordon Biersch

Brew as if beer is a gift from a benevolent universe. because it is

I’ve been having some problems fine tuning my all grain system.  My efficiency was suffering, so we increased the crush on my barley crusher.  This was great for the efficiency, but caused a host of other problems. The false bottom on my mash tun definitely did not like the finer crush and even with recirculation the vorlauf became long and difficult.   So this weekend I created a manifold for the mash tun using stainless steel braid. I’m not sure if I will use this with or without the false bottom but I think it should solve the problems created by the finer crush.