I submitted my Hoppy Gnome IPA to this year’s National Homebrew Competition.  It didn’t make it out of the regional round, but it did do very well – a 37.5 out of 50 possible points, good enough to earn a Silver Certificate, which I fully intend to frame and display proudly.  This is only the second recipe I came up with on my own, and American IPA is a notoriously difficult category, because of the large number of entries this category receives.  It did much better than I hoped.

The feedback from the judges was wonderful and detailed- exactly what I was hoping for.  Getting help improving this beer was one of the main reason I decided to enter it, so these judge sheets are gold to me.  As good as this beer was (I have only one lonely bottle of it left), I have every hope that it can be even better.  Here are the judge sheets: