Reinheitsgebot Competition

[AtlanticRebel]

With the warmer season quickly approaching, I am hoping to finally get setup and start some all grain brewing.  I was wondering if anyone would be interested in doing a fun competition sometime this summer.  No restriction on style itself, so long as your beer conforms to Reinheitsgebot(German Beer Purity Law).

I would assume that most enthusiasts here already know what Reinheitsgebot is, but for those that do not, it simply states that beer shall contain ONLY Barley, Water, Hops, and Yeast.

Any thoughts?

[Roger]

We should probably include yeast...
Otherwise it could get interesting. A bunch of spontaneous fermentation. It might be interesting in a good way though.

[AtlanticRebel]

Funny thing about that, yeast was not included in the original law as it was not yet known to be responsible for fermentation, and all beers were actually fermented by wild yeasts.

[Roger]

Yea that's true but once they realized that yeast was responsible for fermentation it was added.
If there's enough interest in wild/spontaneous fermentation we can certainly try it for a competition.

[pliny]

Wether it's a Kolsch or German Ale or something clean type of beer, that makes for a good competition. Spring time is a good time for it.
There are several German Yeasts.
Perhaps an issue is that not many brew that style of beer around these parts. But another way to look at it is that it forces you to brew something different.

[Two Wheeler]

This could be a good idea for the Spring Mash Occur. I'd suggest we'd limit it to German styles?

[AtlanticRebel]

Kolsch would make a nice summer beer.  I've been thinking of doing a small batch of something like that anyways, would work well if we are planning on doing a grain order soon.

Another thing we would need to figure is out, how strict we want to stick to the law, there's a lot of people that feel things like Irish Moss/Whirlfloc precipitate out, so it's not in direct violation.  I've read the same of Fermcap.

Other considerations would be force carbonation, priming with sugar vs priming with extract.