Techniques For Winning At Competitions

Here’s a good question I received from Luke. He wants to know if I have any techniques for winning beer competitions.

The obvious answer is to brew technically perfect beer rated by style, but of course it’s more important than that. Like any competition, players bend or look for ways to push the rules.

For example, I know for a fact that a friend enters and wins medals in the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) in English Mild/Bitter. But their own website lists the beer as 27 IBUs and 5.3% ABV, when the style guidelines list a proper Bitter ABV at 3% to 4.2%.

So, my first piece of advice if you want to get noticed by the beer judges is to brew your entry on the larger side.

The other thing I have done is to look at past winners’ lists. The GABF and World Beer Cup list them on their websites. Each category not only lists the winners but also lists how many entries there were. I believe I am not the only one to do this, but I try to concentrate my efforts on the categories with the fewest entries.

That being said, I also only enter beers I think I can do a good job brewing. For example, I love lagers, but mostly I am an ale brewer, so even though category 58, Bock had only 54 entries, I would skip that and instead go for category 71 Scottish Style Ale with only 31 entries. I know how to brew those styles and they fit with my house yeast.

Next on my list is to actually go to the websites of the brewers that medaled in that category. You can sometimes learn a lot that way. Often the site will state the IBU’s and gravity of the beers, as well as specialty grains used. This insight can inform your decision about that category.

With all that said, however, if I’m feeling lucky, I may enter a category where I don’t brew that type of beer, but the style is so intriguing that I think it’s worth a shot. I brew a Belgian Style Blonde though not for competition, but in seeing the results from 2025s GABF, that category only had 25 entries. It would be hard not to make a Hail Mary shot at that.

I know I’m not the only one who approaches competitions like this. It’s expensive, but the marketing feels worth it because it gives you street creds about your beer. As I’ve gone on and on (blah, blah, blah) the success of your brewery is so much more than the quality of your beer.

But at the heart of why we do what we do, it’s the love of the craft and we want to brew the best beers we can. It would be nice to have a little recognition, too!

I’d love to hear how you decide what to enter in competition.