Maltose Falcons Doug King Memorial Entry Deadline

[dhempy]

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Details for this event.

[bwarbiany]

Anyone entering that has time to take beers up to one of the drop-off points next week? The styles are relatively restricted (Brad N., there's a LOT of lagers in this comp so you may want to consider it), but it looks like my session red ale will fit into 2 of their categories.

I'm unlikely to make it up there for drop-off, but if anyone local to OC is going to be making a trek, I can find a way to get the beers in your hands...

[BrewMasterBrad]

I've never entered this comp. It has pretty narrow categories and I have a problem in general with the Maltose Falcons categories. For some reason they choose to put time and effort into creating their own categories rather than following the BJCP style guidelines. I am not saying that the BJCP style guidelines are perfect, but the MFs are the only club that I have ever seen do this. I find it elitist and very annoying.

With all that being said, I really don't have any lagers ready at the moment. I have a Munich Helles conditioning and I just brewed a Vienna.

[bwarbiany]

It has pretty narrow categories and I have a problem in general with the Maltose Falcons categories. For some reason they choose to put time and effort into creating their own categories rather than following the BJCP style guidelines. I am not saying that the BJCP style guidelines are perfect, but the MFs are the only club that I have ever seen do this. I find it elitist and very annoying.

I understand the criticism, especially since I think you tend to brew "to style" more than I do... I often brew something and when competition time rolls around, tend to look at the style guidelines to see where it fits.

I also think that in some areas, the BJCP guidelines make for poor comparisons in competitions. I.e. American Pale Ale, American Amber Ale, and American Brown Ale are grouped together despite being very different, and then becomes one of the most popular categories completely dominated by APA. MF has an APA category all to itself, which given the number of entries usually in that category makes sense. Then they roll American Amber/Red ales into their "American west coast style ales" category with Extra Pale Ale and Cali Common (and Imperial Pilsner which admittedly seems out of place). And they put American Brown ale up with English browns and milds.

Plus, they can be more nimble than BJCP, i.e. they have responded to the black IPA craze by putting Black IPA as a recognized style in the IPA category rather than Cat 23, and the same goes for Belgian IPA. While doing that, they moved Double IPA into a "strong beer" category with barleywine & wheatwine, and Imperial stout into a different "strong beer" category, again I think since IPA and stout are just HUGE categories for entries and they wanted to spread it out.

My guess is that they've looked at historic entry rates in various categories and they've seen that some categories are huge and ultra-competitive while others are often overlooked. So they rearranged some styles to balance it out, as well as to include certain styles which are popular but which BJCP hasn't gotten around to including.

Is it elitist? That's a judgement call. Is it annoying? I can see why anyone would think so, because it's so different than what we're used to. But I can see evidence based on how they've set up their categories that there might have been some deliberate thought into how and why they've arranged things the way they did. Some would say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", to which I think they looked at the styles and said "this is broke, let's fix it."