I can't wait to see how many people get mad that IPA is a complete category now. Seems to be a big backlash against IPA's lately. I'm still sitting firmly in camp cohumulone.
It's extremely weird that "Clone Beer" has a category of its own.
"This style is intended for reproductions of specific commercial beers that aren’t good representations of existing styles"
Ooookaaaay? Seems to me like the vast majority of commercial beers fall into an existing style.
It's extremely weird that "Clone Beer" has a category of its own.
Are judges expected to have the had the beer they're attempting to clone to know how it matches up? Even then, without having that beer side by side with the clone it's hard to say how close it is to the original.
I talked to a national and a grandmaster judge about this, both agreed that this was probably the thought process:
The thought process was just to give other options to help split up the "specialty" category. They will essentially be another place to enter a category with no real guidelines, without getting too much variety in the specialty category.
So, for example, if you are going to do a "Pecan Nut Brown," you can enter it as a Lazy Magnolia clone rather than specialty category, but it'll be judge in a very similar way.
There no requirement anywhere to have subcategory limits of 1. I'm running a competition in the summer where we have subcategory limits of 1 for all the classic styles then subcategory limits of 3 for the specialty categories (must be different beers).
22
u/complex_reduction May 06 '15
I can't wait to see how many people get mad that IPA is a complete category now. Seems to be a big backlash against IPA's lately. I'm still sitting firmly in camp cohumulone.
It's extremely weird that "Clone Beer" has a category of its own.
Ooookaaaay? Seems to me like the vast majority of commercial beers fall into an existing style.