Anyway, iBrew Challenge 2013 just came and went over the weekend, and I was all excited about it - firstly, since last year's was cancelled. Also, our bunch of meetup brew buddies will also be going and it's always so much more fun to have good company at events. And finally, I wanted to enter the beers lol.Unfortunately because of all sorts of celebrations due to our new addition to the family, almost all of my previously-planned beers and kegs were consumed and I had to re-brew some. I only entered 6 beers in the end - 2 of them were still bottle-conditioning.
Of these, only the gueuze and double IPA got through to the second round. And I was really rooting for the DIPA to win something, since I quite liked it. Surprisingly enough though, it was the gueuze that took the gold (in the Belgian category). And even more surprisingly, it managed to get BoS! "Shock" would be a better word to describe this, rather than it being a surprise. Not that it wasn't good - at the risk of blowing my own trumpet, I thought it was as good a gueuze as I could possibly have come up with, at least in the space of slightly more than a year. It did have less acidity and funk that I would have liked though, and the judges seemed to concur that it would benefit from more aging as well. Anyway, the-making-of will come in another post. I'll probably use Brett lambicus instead of Brett b. in future to accentuate the funk.
My buddy John took home the gold for the Ale category with his IPA, which was a great job considering how many entries there were in that category! All in all, I think it was a wonderful day for our meetup club - we took 2 out of the 4 categories, plus John was runner-up in 2 of them as well.
I was disappointed in some aspects though. First, the keg competition. OK, that one is more of a popularity contest, but honestly I felt that Nick's keg was great and should've been in the top 5! Also, the usual pre-selection phase. IDK, but I feel that all entries should be tried by a sanctioned BJCP judge. Whether or not it gets a prize is secondary - I think what most of us are after is really the professional feedback. And finally, the categories. It's quite a skew here, with barely a tiny handful of entries in the lager category obviously, and huge competition in the ale category. Hopefully in future there will be enough entries such that IPAs can be grouped together, so as to give some breathing space for other ale styles like english ales and regular pale ales.
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