True Brewer
Our annual True Brewer Competition is a combined holiday homebrew exchange and internal homebrew competition that determines the holder of the True Brewer title for the following year.
Our current True Brewer is Jamie Fowler!
2021 Competition
The bottle collection for the 2021 competition will occur mid to late November 2021. There will once again be 12 and 24-bottle levels of participation, and the winner will be selected by ranked ballot. Get brewing!
Previous Years
Click for competition details.
The 2020 competition was won by Jamie Fowler
Jamie’s winning brew was a Tropical Pale Ale, called Quetzal.
The 2020 True Brewer was determined using a ranked ballot (same as 2019). Participants chose their first (3 points), second (2 points), and third (1 point) favourite beers out of what they tried, and based on the points acquired by each brewer by the end of the voting period, the title of True Brewer was awarded.
There were two levels of participation: 12-bottle and 24-bottle. A point correction was used to give an equal chance of winning to both participation levels.
The 2019 competition was won by Chris Kwietniowski
Chris‘ Winning brew was a Fruitcake RIS.
The 2019 True Brewer was determined using a ranked ballot (liked we used for People’s Choice in 2018). Participants chose their first (3 points), second (2 points), and third (1 point) favourite beers out of what they tried, and based on the points acquired by each brewer by the end of the voting period, the title of True Brewer was awarded.
There were two levels of participation: 12-bottle and 24-bottle. A point correction was used to give an equal chance of winning to both participation levels.
The 2018 competition was won by Mike Hurst
Mike‘s winning brew was a Rauchbier.
The 2018 competition had 2 levels of participation for the homebrew exchange portion: 12-bottle and 24-bottle.
Participation in the competition aspect in 2018 was optional but encouraged. The competition required 2 extra (unmarked) bottles, which were judged in a BOS style competition by blind BJCP judges.
We also held a people’s choice vote, which was won by Phil Harrison.
The 2017 competition was won by Justin Angevaare
Justin‘s winning brew was a Schwarzbier.
The entries in this competition had few limitations – be brewed in 2017, and be beer. The competition judges were the participating True Grist members.
Each participant in this competition had to provide a bottle of their entry to each other participant (to a maximum of 24 bottles). These bottles had to be unlabelled and unmarked, 30-50cl in size, and have only the identifying sticker provided by the organizers of the competition. Both the entries, and the judges were fully anonymized during the competition.
Participants are asked to submit their ratings of each beer through the month of December as they tried them. Beers will not be judged by how representative they are of any style.
In January, each judges scores for each beer will be tabulated. The beer with the highest average score will identify our winning brewer.
