Beer Plagarism

My club did our own "brewola", made kits from the same ingredients, and everyone participant brewed their own. The beers were judged using BJCP guidelines. the result was a 20 point difference in beers brewed with the exact same ingredients. Equipment, process, and water were the differences.

 

Well, I do know Jamil started Heretic Brewing, which is based in Fairfield, CA and makes what is probably my favorite commercially available porter. (Their other stuff's excellent, too.) I would assume he's putting Heretic's stuff into pro competitions, and that he probably has little time for entering homebrewing contests. But those are only my assumptions.

 

I do know that Jamil said he had retired from competitions even before he started Heretic. That's not to say he couldn't be doing it again, but my guess would be no (for homebrew).

 

Interesting to read this, along with rocdoc's post. It's the first I've heard of a test like this, and it more than confirms my expectations. It'd be great if Zymurgy or BYO might do a similar test so this would be more widely understood.

I think some of the books out there ("Extreme Brewing" comes to mind ... or whatever that one's called) really serve to give newbies the impression that great brewing is all about creativity and coming up with crazy recipe ideas that somehow no one else has ever thought of. As this test demonstrates, it's really about having control over your process.

 

Avery is going to confiscate your ribbon. Enter at your own risk.

 

He retired from homebrew competitions before Heretic.

 

The only thing that I would consider "Beer Plagarism", would be buying a beer and saying you brewed it.

 

The point's been made that if you take the brewery's recipes and scale them down the result will be nothing like the original.Even simply changing the fermentation vessels can cause problems to long established professionals with regard to flavour matching.
About 45 years ago a guy called Dave Line published a book called "Brewing beers like those you buy" , he visited the breweries and with their help compiled a recipe book.I quote a little from his introduction;
"Even though I have been entrusted with the complete formulation and brewing techniques...it would be pointless duplicating them here.To achieve the best results it is often necessary to change the basic ingredients and even add others."