Do the final round scorecards get mailed out?
I would like brew my beer that made it to finals again thus month, but I would like to tweak it in the positive direction.
They should, they looked like scoresheets that were headed back to the brewer.
They were slightly different, but you’ll get them. Second round uses the checklist scoresheet with fewer written comments.
http://www.bjcp.org/docs/Beer_checklist.pdf
Kind of bummed to see that >:( Just like a lot of us, I enter comps for feedback and dialing in brewing processes/recipes. Pretty hard to do unless you receive written comments!!
c’mon. you get feedback in the first round. The Finals are one of few contests a year that are more about determining the best homebrew, not so much about feedback. Nearly 200 judges of generally very high experience levels gave up some or all of a day at the conference to judge them.
Also, I don’t think there is truly much if any of a reduction in helpful comments. The checklist just removes a lot of the need to write out the levels of the basic attributes, which should have already been described in your first round scoresheet. And there is no checklist scoresheet for mead/cider so those people got a standard scoresheet.
my hand was significantly less cramped by the end of the second session. Since we are writing less, we can concentrate on evaluating the beer.
I agree with udubdawg. You have already paid for your feedback in the first round, the fact that your beer has advanced to the second round WITH NO EXTRA CHARGE means that you have already got your money’s worth.
Just the perspective of a 2011 gold medal winner.
Actually it cost me almost 20 bucks to ship my beer (three bottles) to Philly from the west coast. I only entered two beers in the NHC and it cost my almost 70 bucks when it was all said and done… ??? I was really hoping to get feedback from at least a National ranked judge or higher in the second round. I will be VERY disappointed if all I get back is a sheet with boxes checked.
Well, you’ll probably get three sheets with boxes checked and some comments, at least one of which from a high ranking judge.
I would have preferred to use the regular score sheets in the category I judged, Specialty. The check box score sheets are not designed for odd beer styles.
Did you not get feedback in the first round?
If you’re just looking for feedback, then another, more local competition might be better suited to that. I tend to treat NHC as a place I only send my best beers.
The scoresheets were not my favorite. I found them difficult to provide decent feedback, so by the end I was writing on them anyway. They definitely did not speed up judging, we were still running 15 minutes or so a beer.
You should get plenty of feedback from the scoresheets, just in a different format. There were spaces for written comments too, I used these as “sum it all up in a sentence or two” opportunities a couple entries into our flight. If there’s no written comments, you’ll have to interpret the check boxes. Problem areas were supposed to be circled, assessments were checked. So lets say you entered a pilsner colored stout, the “Straw” box would be circled, meaning the color was out of style. If you entered a pilsner colored pilsner, the “Straw” box for colored would be checked, meaning that was the color and it was probably ok. I say probably, because maybe the judge missed the instructions to circle the problem areas. So you’ll have to read between the lines a little bit.
Our table was loaded with high ranking judges, of the 8 of us there must have been 5 nationals and 1 master level judge. I judged with another national judge and we were in sync right away.
I agree though, if you’re lucky enough to get your beer through to the 2nd round, you deserve to know in a general way at least, what it tasted like when it was poured.
But… think of it this way. Many scoresheets I’ve received from competitions have 2-3 lines filled out for each section. Compared to that, this actually has a lot MORE information about the characteristics of your beer. And it still should have a few written comments too. I always wrote down what was great or really needed improvement to give the brewer an idea of our thoughts regarding it’s score.
What about posting of scores on our entry page??? Anyone know if those are going to get put up, or why they have not already been posted?
Remember that all AHA and competition staff were at/running/breaking down the conference. They probably didn’t leave until yesterday.
That just seems like something that usually gets done as the competition progresses - Many times, it is not uncommon to see the scores going in while the competition is actually taking place as flights are finished - even before final awards banquet. I am assuming that all the scores were already entered in the program as flights finished up… at that point, isn’t it just a matter of making them visible? Maybe they have to take them back to denver and hand enter each one after the competition is over, but that would seem strange to me.
I know the conf. is a massive undertaking… so not trying to play down all the time and effort that must go into that, but putting up scores on our entry page seems like something that would not be real hard. But, I could be missing something.
The theory is that you got feedback in the first round. We used to use the same scoresheets for the second round, but it became impossible to do all the judging in the time we had when we used the traditional sheets. That said, I still write lots of comments on the checkbox sheets.
Really? I find that for me and the people I judge with it’s more like 6-7 min. per beer.
I think the checklist formatted scorecards provide a quicker/efficient means to communicate feedback, on almost every aspect of the beer plus some, and if there’s something else that I wanted to include I would provide some written comments in the extra space provided, which was the case for every beer that I judged in this year’s final round.
IMO, the checklist format allows for more information to be communicated to the brewer, as opposed to the “written only” format which comes back with the comments and highlights of the beer. The checklist enables/directs the judge to review every aspect of the entry, as opposed to what’s on the top of the judges mind.
What I like about the checklist is that it provides a common vocabulary for all the judges, so it eliminates the vagaries of terminology. I once read a scoresheet where the judge described a beer as “tanky”. WTF does that mean? The checkboxes eliminate that, or at least cut it down since the judge would have to write that kind of comment separately.
So is it a possibility we will transition to using these check sheets in regular comps in the future?