So I recently entered an APA and a Tripel into a competition. I was very careful to keep the bottles separate, but I guess I wasn’t as careful with the labels because I accidentally labeled one of the bottles of APA as a Tripel.
Surprisingly, they still scored it as a 24 (which was way overgenerous). Awesomely, the judges realized what happened and scored my second bottle as well, even though it didn’t count for the comp.
The actual bottle of Tripel scored a 39.5, so I’m really kicking myself for this one.
I thought it was cool of them to score my second bottle anyway, and one of the judges even emailed me prior to posting the scoresheets to let me know what happened, which I really appreciated.
I like seeing this about competitions. It seems that too often beer competitions are more about finishing, getting everything done on time than actually providing feedback.
Did they also send you any feedback on the APA?
Yeah, this was definitely one of the better run competitions I’ve entered recently. The winners list was up the day after judging and electronic score sheets were posted in under two weeks. I’ll try to remember to enter it again next year (St. Louis Brews Happy Holidays Homebrew Competition).
Yes, it scored a 34.5 (I posted about that one in the recipe section).
If I labeled one of the APAs as a Tripel, I must have labeled one of the Tripels as an APA, but the bottle they selected for judging was the correctly labeled one. I got lucky there I guess.
That’s good they figured it out, although I’m surprised they didn’t judge it “for real”… if they were able to figure out that a mistake was made (and not just some random bottle infection or something where the two tasted opposite) they could have still judged it.
As a judge director if they had asked me about it, and say a steward had looked at the bottles and figured it out (so the judges didn’t see your name, etc) I would have directed to them to judge it as best as possible and ignoring the first bottle as if it didn’t exist. Bottles get mislabeled in bottle sort and even sometimes the wrong bottle gets taken to a table, so it’s possible it wasn’t even your mistake. A good crew can limit these mistakes, but hey as we all know, stuff happens. Essentially treating it like a bottle that’s a gusher or undercarbed and then the second bottle is just fine, you judge the second bottle. If both bottles are “bad” you just work with what you can.