I talked with the owner of Copper Tail Brewing in Tampa, Kent Bailey (they have been great in reaching out to local homebrewers) about doing some sort of brewing contest where the winner gets to brew with Casey, their head brewer, and get their beer sold on tap at the tasting room. If the beer is really good then they might invite the winner back to brew it on the 50bbl system, or just to brew a production beer on the 50 bbl.
Well, after getting Kent drunk at a beer fests and a Copper Tail tasting he agreed to do a contest. Casey came up with the idea of doing War Of The Worts! Casey would mash in make an ass load of wort, then whoever wanted to from my club could come by and get up to 20 gallons of wort to turn into beer. We can use whatever hop combinations and yeast we want. The idea is to make a bunch of different beers. Then we bring the beers to Copper Tail and do a tasting/judging and decide the best beer as well as show how different the beers can turn out with different techniques all from the same wort. The winner gets their beer brewed on the pilot system for the tasting room and possibly the big system for distribution if Kent deems it worthy enough. We'd never assume to make them do anything that effected their business.
So, come December or so we're gonna get some wort! Hopefully we can come up with 40 or so beers to make out of it. I'm gonna aim for 4 different beers. I don't know what the wort will be yet.
Cheers!