First Medal!

Jeremy and have entered beers in two competitions so far this year. (We also helped to run one that our club, Square Kegs, put on. That's another post.)

That's a medal all right. More nerdy photos on instagram

We entered a handful of beers in both and won our first official medal! It's definitely a proud moment, particularly given the size of the Drunk Monk Challenge competition this year (806 entries) and the size of the Porter Category (29). We brewed the Robust Porter recipe out of Brewing Classic Styles and took third place with a score of 34.

Interestingly, we also entered the same beer in our Winterbrew competition and scored a 32.5 a month ago. The judges notes were all generally aligned, but I was particularly impressed by the feedback from a master judge who picked out the one major process flaw in the beer. We brewed on December 1st here in Chicago and ended up mashing at 151F instead of our target of 154F. (It gets cold here. We use coolers and a single infusion. For now.)

Empirically, we're getting better as brewers. The beers we entered in competition last year averaged high twenties with one outlier in the high thirties. This year, we're averaging mid-thirties.

Here's a recap of our entries and scores:

Winterbrew 2013:

Munich Helles: 34
Robust Porter: 32.5
Rye Pale Ale: 32
Russian Imperial Stout: 32.3

Drunk Monk: 

Robust Porter: 34
Russian Imperial Stout: 24
* I'm fairly certain that we mis-categorized the stout by not entering it as a wood-aged beer. It was in a 5 gallon whiskey barrel for a month and interestingly enough, won a club competition which coincided with Goose Island's Quest for the Imperial Goose.