Pick one ingredient and try to make it
pop. Accentuate it anyway you
possibly can. Because I'm looking for
something that really stands out at the table.
A couple things. First off, think in
general about how you make good homebrew.
First off, cleaning and sanitation, after
that temperature control and then start
thinking about your recipe, 'okay, am I
adding anything? Are there any adjuncts?
How am I gonna put these into play and
overall balance?' You know if you're gonna put
coffee in there is it gonna be in balance
with the chocolate?
Carbonation. This is my third judging for this and I can
tell you 100 percent that if you do not
carbonate correctly
it totally affects the way that we see your beer.
I would tell people to make
sure you leave enough time between when
you bottle your beer and when you turn it in
for judging. A lot of times that's where
we get under attenuated beers that have
a lot of foam because it just hasn't
had quite enough time for the yeast to
finish doing what it needs to do in the bottle.
Well from years past I can say
that if you're going to use a lot of
spices or have a spiced beer, I would
hope that you have a lot of practice
with those spices because a competition
is usually not a time to experiment with
those sorts of things.
One of the biggest
pieces of advice that I give to a lot of
home brewers is to make sure your beer
ferments all the way through, it
attenuates fully. Some tricks to that can
be temperature control, make sure your
beers not too cold or the yeast
will peter out. Make sure you pitch enough
yeast. Make sure you don't cut it off too
soon, give it time to do what it
wants to do. But the other piece of
advice I would say, at the end of the day
just have fun and enjoy what you're
doing, it's just a hobby. Each beer you
can learn from and you're going to make
mistakes and that's the best way to
learn is to make mistakes and to get
better each time and have fun.
