I know it was a while back, but the Bobby Brown Ale that I brewed before Christmas has been on tap for a few weeks now and I entered a bottle into a club brew competition so I wanted to get my notes down.
Over all, this was a pretty straight forward brew day. Single infusion of about 8 gallons at 170.5f to get a 158f grain bed temp. I held this for an hour, mashed out and sparged all as normal. The pre-boil gravity was 1.049 (target was 1.045).
When everything was all said and done, I was a little low on my volume and high on my gravity so I added some water to get the volume I was looking for.
Now as I mentioned, I entered this beer into a “club only” competition to get some feed back on how things went. These club only competitions are a lot of fun because you get some input from guys who really know their beers. This is even better than just bringing your beers to the homebrew club because sometimes at brew club you end up trying so many different beers, your pallet can really get scorched.
Anyway, unfortuniatly with this brown ale, I had some problems with my bottling again. In this case, I know exactly what I did wrong; I used DME for priming instead of Dex. This is actually not a bad thing to do, you just need to adjust the volumes appropriately and I obviously made a mistake. Otherwise the feedback was good even though I was reaching in entering this beer into an “English brown ale competition” (it’s more of an American Brown) so all things considered they responded with descriptions that fit what I was going for.
Did I win, nope, but competitions are not all about winning, they’ll all about those review sheets IMO anyway.
Cheers
