Limbo Challenge 2011 Information Topic

[Jimmy Orkin]

We are having our first Limbo Challenge planning meeting on May 4 at Catfish House in Carrollton. Catfish House is located at 3108 Old Denton Road Carrollton, TX 75007. The official meeting will start at 7:00 PM.

The remaining planning meetings will be on the first Wednesday of the month.

The big change for this year is the provisional addition of American Pale and American Amber styles.

We have several items to discuss:

1. Location for the Awards Ceremony.
2. Head steward position.
3. Data person.
4. Awards, type and source.
5. Must be more but I cannot think of them as I write this.

Please come with your ideas.

Here are some of the facts we know.

Dates:
Entries Dates: July 25 through August 5th.
Login at TBD.
Judging at Melinda and Brian Beyer’s house: August 13, 14.
Event on August 27, location TBD.

Head Judge: Don Trotter.

Entries will be accepted at Homebrew Headquarters and the Wine Maker’s Toy Store.
If you would like to assist in any aspect of the Limbo, I encourage you to contact me at [email protected]

[Jimmy Orkin]

We held the first planning meeting on Wednesday 5/4 at Catfish House.

Attendees
Fred and Sue David
Leroy Gharis
Mike Grover
Brian and Melinda Beyer
Scott Townson
Einar Jonsson
Chuck Homola
Jimmy Orkin

Head Judge is Don Trotter.
Head Steward is Einar Jonsson.
We will judge at Brian and Melinda's in Carrollton.

Jimmy is going to ask John at Rugby House about doing the awards ceremony at Rugby House. Other places mention were Whiskey Cake and Vickery Park.

Brian is going to handle getting the awards. He will work with J Paul. We will get the same metals and glasses as last year.

We need to work on a plan to manage the bottle category labels. Either use letters on the bottles or change the entry labels to use the Limbo assigned numbers.

Jimmy will count the case boxes we have and see if we need more. Scott can get them from Billy Bobs if we need more.

We need a lawn mower blade. A good mangled one.

We need to confirm that Richard Harris will apply the gold leaf.

We may make some posters for the local homebrew stores.

Jimmy needs to decide whether to make the shipping location be HBHQ or WMTS.

We decided to add a statement to the rules that bottle caps should be silver or gold.

We decided to split the "German Wheat and Rye Beer, Belgian and French Ale, & Sour Ale" category.

The two new categories are "German Wheat" and "Belgian and French and Sour Ale".

The next meeting will be on June 1 at Rugby House.

Please let me know if I made any mistakes.

I look forward to seeing everyone next meeting.

Jimmy

[Jimmy Orkin]

We held the second planning meeting last night at The Rugby House Pub.

Attendees:
Leroy Gharis
Einar Jonsson
Chuck Homola
Kelly Harris
Don Trotter
Fred David
Jimmy Orkin

We discussed making the Limbo a two bottle competition instead of the three bottles we used in the past. We decided we like the flexibility of three bottles and will not change the number of bottles we required.

We discussed the problem we had last year with incorrect category numbers being applied to the bottles caps. We decided to go with BJCP category numbers and abandon the Limbo category numbers we used in the past. That means that after log in, we will have boxes with bottles with category labels of 3 and 4 for European Amber Lager & Dark Lager, 12 and 13 for Brown Porter & Dry Stout, and 16 and 17 for Belgian and French Ale, & Sour Ale.

We discussed splitting the existing Limbo category of German Wheat and Rye Beer, Belgian and French Ale, & Sour Ale. We decided to go ahead and make the split. The two new categories will be: "German Wheat" and "Belgian and French Ale, & Sour Ale". Jimmy will update the website.

Don will get a lawn mower blade for the Best of Show Trophy.

Fred will make posters and distribute them to the homebrew stores in DFW, Austin and Houston.

Fred is contemplating making t-shirts with the Limbo logos on them.

Homebrew HQ will be the shipping site for Limbo entries. Homebrew HQ and The Wine Makers Toy store will be drop off locations of entries. Do we want to have other homebrew stores be drop off locations? Will anyone volunteer to drive and pick up the entries before log in?

Einar Jonsson is the Head Steward.

We need to check the existing printed BJCP Guidelines we have in storage to see it they have category 10 in them.

Our next meeting will occur on July 6 BJ's Restaurant in Addison. Business will start around 7:00 PM.

Thanks to those that attended.

[Jimmy Orkin]

We met last night at BJs Addison.

Attendees:
Leroy Gharis
Fred David
Curtis Martin
Einar Jonsson
Jimmy Orkin

Fred is still working on the posters.

Jimmy is doing the website and the data processing for the event.

Einar will find a dropoff site in the mid-cities or further west. Einar will confirm that we can drop off to Jimmy by July 13. Jimmy will then put it on the website.

Jimmy asked Einar to define and document a login process. Einar will have something to review by July 27. Einar asked about the ability of the HCCP software ability to track entries by box. HCCP has no ability to track case boxes. We either need to sort into category boxes at login or track case boxes in a separate system.

We need to move the club kegerator the Beyer's for refrigeration storage for judging.

We will meet one last time on August 3 at Gordon Biersch in Plano. Business to start around 7:00PM.

Let me know if I missed anything or made any mistakes.

[Jimmy Orkin]

The online entry system on the Limbo website has been turned up. You can start entering your entries now.

[Jimmy Orkin]

We met last night at Gordon Biersch.

Attendees:
Melinda Beyer
Brian Beyer
Fred David
Mike Grover
Curtis Martin
Einar Jonsson

Here are my notes:

Brian will bring some tables and chairs from WMTS to help with Login and Judging.

Jimmy realized that the limbo registration page makes no edits other than looking for spammers. Jimmy will look into a better registration system after the Limbo is over.

The Beyer's have the club kegerator and a new freezer to refrigerate the limbo entries.

Login will start at 9:00 AM at the Beyer's on this Saturday the 6th. We are looking for folks to come help with login.

Judging will start at 9:00 AM at the Beyer's on Saturday the 13th. We are looking for many judges to come judge the Limbo.

Brian will get some craft paper to cover the tables and some tape to make the case boxes.

Don will need to get the cups, water and bread for judging.

We are almost there. Thanks for everyone's help.

If anyone has any questions, please contact Jimmy at [email protected].

[Jimmy Orkin]

We held the Limbo Wrap Up meeting at the Catfish House on September 7. Here are my notes from the meeting.

Attendees
Don Trotter
Leroy Gharis
Mike Grover
Adam Wood
Chuck Homola
Einar Jonsson
Jimmy Orkin

We made the following decisions:

1. Merge the German Wheat category back into Belgian and Sour category.
2. Add Saison to German Wheat, Belgian and Sour.
3. Add American Brown to the American Ales category.
4. Merge Other Smoke and Wood category into the Fruit Beer & Spice/Herb/Vegetable Beer category.
5. Don will update the Limbo Style Guidelines document to discuss the gravity max of 1.050. If a beer is though to be bigger than 1.050 it will be excluded from winning a medal. Jimmy to post the updated guidelines on the Limbo site after Don sends the updated PDF file to Jimmy.
6. Jimmy will add a similar disclaimer to the Styles page of the Limbo website.
7. Allow plastic bottles. Can be up to 16 ounces and must fit in a regular case box. This is to help the entrants that have their glass bottle entries crushed by UPS and FedEx.

We discussed raising the price of the competition to $8 per entry but decided to keep it at $7 for now since we removed two medal categories.

I did some rough calculations and I think the Limbo was in the Black with $150 this year.

I will update the Limbo website this weekend with these changes.

It has been a pleasure running the Limbo Challenge for the last two years. I am announcing my retirement of the Limbo Directorship. We will need someone to take over early next year.

[Bill Lawrence]

In regards to decision #5, would that not cause the competition to be "out of wack" with the style guidelines thereby causing the competition to be out of compliance with BJCP guidelines? For instance, if an American pale ale can go as high as say 1.055 and the judges deem an otherwise winning beer at the top end of the range to be too big (ie; over 1.050) and effectively disqualify it, would that not cause issues? Incidentally, I am just curious, I really don't give a "tinkers damn" one way or the other (plus I rather enjoy stirring up trouble just for the hell of it).

[Jimmy Orkin]

Bill proposes an interesting question. What does everyone else think.

[BrotherhoodBrew]

I personally say that we pick styles that fit the overall goal of the competition and no worry if they are over 1.050. Just make sure we don't pick styles that go to far out of the spirit of the limbo competition.

[Jimmy Orkin]

I personally say that we pick styles that fit the overall goal of the competition and no worry if they are over 1.050. Just make sure we don't pick styles that go to far out of the spirit of the limbo competition.

That said, what do you think about Saison? A 1.050 Saison could be a great session beer. The BJCP guidelines say a Saison can go up to 1.065.

[Jimmy Orkin]

One alternative we have is to create our own Guidelines by modifying the BJCP guidelines and change the wording and the numbers for borderline or over the border styles to be 1.050 or less.

[BrotherhoodBrew]

I think it might be hard to enforce the 1.050 guideline. I think low gravity saisons are great but the 1.065 could be a problem. If you changed the guidelines I guess that could work but then who is the final judge or if it is out of style or do we just "feel" like it is too big for the comp?