NSW Home Brew Championships 2016

The State's were held last weekend 20/21 August at Castle Hill Showground, with over 500 entries in 22 Categories. The judges have commented on the generally high quality of beers entered.

After quite a bit of deliberating I finally decided on entering 5 beers this year; it took me a while as I didn't think I had any beers that were going to do well in any particular style....not because I didn't have any good beers, I do, but most weren't really 'to style' and that will hurt your scores in such a comp, local shows and such are a much broader range of styles and you can get away with an American hopped English Ale, as an example.

After picking up 2nd in the Pale Lager category last year for my Aussie Lager "loaded dog" I knew I had to put it up again, problem was I stuffed up my dates a little and the Comp came up a few weeks earlier than I was prepared for, as such this years 'loaded dog' was only 3 weeks in the bottle and only just carbed up....far from ideal for a lager that would normally have at least 6 weeks cold chilling before serving.

Anyway judges score sheets arrived last night on the e-mail......I must say I missed seeing the big A4 envelope sticking out of the mail box and getting excited knowing what was in it.

So going through the results and comments I was very happy, no I didn't pick up any places this year, nor did I expect to; this year was about feedback, my beers have attained a level I am pleased with but yes there are little issues that can be fixed and to get a qualified and experienced beer judge to rate and comment on your beer is invaluable, these are the same guys that rate and score commercial beers at things like the International Beer Awards, where they use the same score system and style guidelines....this really put yours beer on comparison to the 'big boys'.

So overall I am very happy with the results, for the most part they point to an issue I have been aware of for about 18 months and have been avoiding addressing and that is water chemistry, a common 'fault' across the 5 beers entered was the level of bitterness, an issue that can be fixed with additions of the correct minerals to my brew water. We have quite good water here in Young but it is low in the minerals that accentuate hop bitterness. It is now foremost on the radar for my brews from now on, so a bit more reading and getting my head around the calculators and then start making those changes. One or two minor issues were also raised which can be easily modified with a tweek of a recipe, mash regime or fermentation process.

All in all, each beer did well, they all scored enough to have qualified for a Bronze medal in an award competition and the 'Loaded Dog' despite not being at its optimum was only half a point off a silver medal. I'm pretty happy with these results, especially given that most commercial beers don't rate higher than a Bronze, in fact many don't rate that highly.

So time to move forward and make even better beer........