Ohio Brew Week's Beer Competition

This past month saw our first entrance in a homebrew competition - Ohio Brew Week - down in Athens, Ohio.We entered three of our beers - the two Golden Amber Wheats and the latest Limon Punch. We had unrealistic high hopes and deep down never expected to place; we were more interested in getting an unbiased review of our brews.

Well, we didn't place in the Top 3 of our categories, but we didn't fair too badly either:  both Golden Amber Wheats received a "Very Good" distincting and the Limon Punch a "Good". The scale was Outstanding, Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, and Problematic. So, technically, we should be rather proud of our accomplishments. But, when I read into the grading it said that the beer was also graded against the style of beer in which it was entered in - some of our comments suggested that we entered it into a 'wrong' style category. So, perhaps the score would have been higher? I'd like to think so!

Regardless, a great first start to perfecting our beers. A common critique was to focus on balancing the beer - balancing the hops and malt. When I think about it, it makes sense that each of the beers had that suggestion - since we used the same amount of malt (exception of the Limon Punch) and used the same proportion of hops at each introduction to the wort (45 min, 15 min, 10 min). So, we need to understand how to better balance our recipe and give it another shot. Unfortunately, it won't be for another month or so as schedules are hectic for the summer!

Here are the score sheets from the competition (good luck reading the handwritting!):

Beer #1:

Beer #2:

Beer #3

Apologies for the watermark, but I had these in a PDF format and had to convert to a JPG to upload - the only free software I found put a watermark on each image.