Before I say anything else, I understand I’m talking about a beer I’ve never tasted.
I was baffled to be scrolling through zymurgy looking at medal winning recipes and seeing the gold medal winning APA used 12 oz of hops total and 6 oz of dry hops in a 6 gallon batch. I immediately went to the bjcp guidelines and looked at the exemplary commercial brews which includes SNPA, Mirror Pond, and Daisy Cutter. Thumbing through Sierra Nevada’s shared recipe and clone recipes of the other 2 they generally contain 3-4 oz of hops.
It must be said the posted recipe uses almost 16 and a half pounds of malt and an efficiency of 59% thus it would be very grainy offering far more balance than one would initially believe when looking at the hop bill.
My confusion here is how a competition holding up snpa et al as prime examples could give gold to a beer that would be so much bigger/bolder in flavor. I’m positive the beer was amazing I’m questioning the value of judgment. I realize the competition isn’t about cloning those style examples but I can’t believe this is a beer that falls within the style guidelines.
Clearly I’m wrong or missing something. There’s just a disconnect between this judgment and the examples held up as most representative of the style.
To the brewer, Jonathan Bacon, I mean absolutely no harm, you did your job very well and have the gold to prove it.
I think you are probably right. APAs that win these days need to be IPAs, IPAs need to be Double IPAs, etc.
And you are also right – neither you nor I have tasted the beer, so we don’t really know for sure how well it fits the style.
Does seem odd to have such poor efficiency. But it happens. Low efficiency should in theory increase malty flavor. Perhaps that is the balance these judges were looking for in the APA. And maybe the brewer diluted the beer down to make it more quaffable? There is a lot we don’t know.
There has been pressure for a long time to make beers more of everything. I don’t do competitions but I see it commercially. I think every Porter I have bought in the last ten years I looked at and tasted and thought “nice stout”.
In some cases, beers that do best at competitions or at beer festivals are usually the ones that are bigger and bolder and hold up extremely well to small samples–but not necessarily side by side with other beers when consumed by the pint.
MY OPINION:
I expect (most) Stouts to have a definite roast presence and they should lean dry, whereas a Porter should be sweeter with a chocolate/caramel presence. I believe there should be a recognizable difference, though what a brewer wants to call their beer is entirely up to them. But like pete b, when I buy a “Stout” or a “Porter”, I expect a certain something, regardless of whether I get it or not.
For me, how a Stout or Porter or Stout Porter was brewed in 1830 doesn’t really have any relevance to today.
There’s a lot of truth in this but it isn’t supposed to be that way. I’ve placed in the best of show round with a blonde ale and have seen many competitions won by unlikely beers. It is supposed to be that way, where you brew to style.
Conversely prior to Covid at our last local public beer festival I showed up in a kilt serving imperial maple bacon stout with free bacon and easily walked away with the peoples choice award because I understood it was about making an impression. I literally called it shooting fish in a barrel. Make no mistake the beer was quite good but a peoples choice is very different from bjcp!
I would agree the style has changed and become more hop forward commercially. I’m quite sure snpa has become more hop forward through the years.
However mostly these commercial realities should not matter in a bjcp competition especially the nationals. What defines commercial beer is immaterial in a bjcp event as the liquid is defined by the guidelines and the commercial references backup those descriptions. When beers fall outside those descriptions they fall outside the guidelines, period.
A perfect example of this is that Tinroof Voodoo Pale Ale won gold at gabf a few years ago which I have zero problem with due to it being a very different competition. I LOVE that beer, but if I turned the hazy soft hop forward beer into a bjcp event as a pale ale I’d expect a 30-35 point score not a 48 point winner. Why? The style guidelines.
Not understand this- why would malt flavor increase? I suppose this could be true if malt flavor extraction efficiency is different that malt sugar extraction efficiency. Is there some other mechanism you have in mind?
I am getting 60-65% efficiency these days and that’s OK. It’s consistent enough to allow me to design and/or adjust recipes. Nothing wrong with it.
I think the APA category has trended more toward a higher ABV and more hop flavor in recent years. 20 years ago they would have been considered IPA’s. I still think SNPA is a classic that never gets old.
I’ll be the outlier and say that I find SNPA to be a mediocre beer. I’ve had many better Pale Ales. Forget the BJCP or competitions, but I’ll take a Dale’s or a Yard’s over a Sierra Nevada any day, to name just a few off the top of my head. I’ll acknowledge that maybe I’m not getting SNPA at its best, but it always comes across as too sweet and very unsessionable to me. Pass.
I guess I think the BJCP style guidelines are more descriptive than prescriptive. The same the dictionary doesn’t define our language, it just describes how we use it.
I don’t the concern over SNPA not medaling. Can multiple beers medal? Either way, there’s 9k breweries out there. It doesn’t seem like a stretch that there are a few out there that make a better pale ale, especially when you have craft malts, advanced hop products, and dozens of new hop varieties.
I’m not the world’s biggest fan of SNPA myself but this is a good example of why beers with higher gravity, hopping, etc. win medals in competition. If you look at Dale’s it’s 6.5% ABV and 65 IBUs, which is well within IPA territory, especially for when it came out. Is it really an APA because they call it one? If not, after twenty years, how much can anybody be expected to care?
More broadly to the discussion: We’re asking a lot from judges, who might spend five minutes max on a beer, to strike entries because they taste too good or seem a little over the top for the style. Guidelines nor competition rules set hard limits on gravity or hopping rate. Competitions don’t require seeing the recipe beforehand and even if they did, it wouldn’t objectively prove anything. A brewer with a dialed in process on a twenty gallon system can brew with better hop utilization than a new brewer with a stove top partial mash. The new brewer might use way more hops but that doesn’t mean that beer necessarily has the best or most hop flavor.
Letting judges come up with their own hard limits is going to create chaotic results and discourage a lot of good brewers. I’ve seen judges try to do this and I’ve only ever seen it turn into a ridiculous discussion. It was obvious in short time in every instance that the judge only cared about showing how smart or superior his palate. If anything, we need a lot less of those judging experiences. I agree judges probably should strike entries obviously beyond the guidelines but striking close calls is probably not in the competition’s best interests.