Month: September 2014

By Posted on Posted in competition, homebrew 4 Comments

Earlier this year, David Bishop (otherwise known as @broadfordbrewer) put together an excellent article on the “State of UK Homebrewing“. He kindly asked me to give my take – and I concentrated a bit on what people like to brew, and what might be trends in the coming year or so. Ali Kocho-Williams, as organiser of the UK National Homebrew Competition has kindly allowed me access to use data from the last 4 competitions to do a bit of analysis to see if there are any trends (going into this I had some suspicions). Jumping straight into it, here’s a table of entries by category …

Style Spreads and Trends, 2011-2014 Read more »

By Posted on Posted in competition, homebrew 2 Comments

Another September, and back to Bristol again for another National Homebrew Competion. Again, another good day judging (though tiring as usual!). This year I was assigned Fruit beers (not my favourite style, but some good examples in there!), a very strong Belgian & French ales, and an American IPA-heavy category 14. I was fortunate enough to pickup some medals and the award for Best of Show for a Munich Helles against some very good beers. Congratulations to *all* the winners – some familiar names and faces included in those lists.