Potential Collaborator Brewers

by Noel Blake

Eligibility and Entry Limitations:

All current Oregon Brew Crew members are eligible. Each member may submit up to two (2) total entries as brewer or co-brewer. Why is this? The Oregon Brew Crew is the Best, and Collaborator only wants the Best of the Best. We want your most creative, best realized, and best executed brews. Save your failed experiments for roomates who leave dirty dishes out.

Entry Packaging:

We need a minimum of two 33cl or 12 oz. (or larger) bottles for the competition, one for the preliminary round and one for the taste-off round. You may subsitute one 22 oz. or larger bottle, however that is not recommended because your beer will be at a significant disadvantage during the taste-off round when compared to other entries poured from fresh bottles. We also need two more bottles for a lab analysis at Widmer that is mandatory should your beer be selected. If your beer is selected and you do not have the analysis samples from the same batch of beer, your entry will be disqualified. If you submit all four bottles by the entry deadline, you will receive a complementary lab analysis from Widmer even if you do not win. This is an optional, free benefit to Collaborator participants.

All entries must be packaged in competition-ready bottles. That means: glass containers affixed with a crown cap, with all labels and markings removed. Raised lettering on a bottle is acceptable. Any cap markings must be obliterated with a Sharpie (or equivalent). No promotional consideration was paid to Widmer, the OBC, or anybody on the Collaborator committee for the aforementioned Sharpie plug.

Do not affix anything whatsoever to the bottle with any form of adhesive (tape, glue, baby poo, whatever), unless you plan on coming to Steinbart’s on Apr. 10 and licking off all offending sticky phenolic crud from your entry. This includes the recipe mentioned in the section immediately below.

Summary: two bottles for the tasting by the entry date, two bottles for lab analysis (optional unless you win). No labels or tape, ever.

Recipe Requirements:

One way Collaborator Competitions are different from other homebrew competitions is that they require a detailed recipe. Widmer wants to know what you’ve put in your heavenly elixir before they commit to making it in their brewhouse. Please print off one recipe for each bottle, including fermentables, hops and spices, water and water treatments, and yeast variety and yeast propagation techniques. Do not forget to include your name and contact information (minimum e-mail address or phone number).

Extra Information:

You may optionally include on your recipe form the name of the brew and the style that it represents. Your beer will not be judged strictly to style, and BJCP guidelines will NOT be enforced. We would like some indication as to the thought process behind your beer. If we don’t see any such information, we’ll assume that your entry is a random style based on a whim. It may work out that way, but your best odds are if you tell us what you were really trying to brew.

Results:

Another significant difference in Collaborator competitions is that judging is not done on the traditional 50-point BJCP scale. In fact, we do not use numerical scores, nor do we compare your beer against the BJCP style guidelines. We judge your beer as would a professional brewer, a publican, or a knowledgeable beer consumer. We are looking for the best recipes, not necessarily the best homebrew, so we will try to account for correctible flaws in your beer.

The judges may award from 0 to many Collaborator winner slots. In the past, we have had competitions where no winners were selected, as unlikely as that sounds. One time we did select four(!) winners. It is not a zero sum game: the better the entries are, the more beers will be selected. There are winners but no losers in Collaborator.

Winners will be announced on the listserve within two days of the judging. Lab analysis results for those who submitted two extra bottles will be provided whenever Widmer publishes them, usually within 2-3 months.

Benefits:

Widmer will pay for the ingredients for up to 5 gallons for each entry. The best way to do this is to direct charge at Steinbart’s. If you did not do so or purchased ingredients elsewhere, you are responsible for submitting your receipts to Widmer to be reimbursed.

Complementary lab analysis, including gravity measurements and IBU, are discussed at length above.

Winning entries receive a potentital slot in the Collaborator program. The brewers will be contacted when their beer is ready to be brewed – this may take up to a year or more. All official brewers and co-brewers will be invited to participate in the recipe formulation, brewing and marketing of the beer. At the time the beer is released, one (and only one) Collaborator jacket will be awarded to the winning brewer or team.

Hints and Tips:

I’ve won four Collaborator competitions, and I’ve been brewing for, organizing and judging this program since it was started. My best advice is to be expressive, authentic, and true to yourself in selecting which beer to brew or enter. Don’t choose a friend for a pre-evaluation of your potential entries; in fact, an enemy works better. If she or he like the beer in spite of the fact the it was you who brewed it, then it’s a winner.

Above that, these guidelines should help you out. We are looking for great pub beers. That means something you will enjoy more than one pint of. We recommend that the O.G. be kept to 1.070 or below, but that is your call if you think you can seduce the judges with your high gravity brew.

We are looking for at least one (but not necessarily all) of the following:

- Yummability (someone else already trademarked “drinkability”):
c’mon, people have to love drinking this beer or it shouldn’t be
entered.
- Wow factor: sometimes overrated, however a great beer always has a Pop!
- Unusual style: impress us with your arcane beer knowledge
- Execution: we do not necessarily deduct for minor flaws, but you do the math

Good luck to you all!

- Noel Blake

History of Collaborator

The Collaborator Project is a collaboration between home brewers in the Oregon Brew Crew and Rob and Kurt Widmer of Widmer Brewing. It all started when the Widmers and fellow Oregon Brew Crew members were talking about how few craft beer styles were available. At the time, craft brewing was holding to the popular styles. If you lived in America and wanted a Belgian Wit or Schwarzbier, you had to depend on beers from Europe. The fact was that these esoteric styles would never be profitable for commercial breweries in the US.

Kurt and Rob looked at that as an opportunity and challenged the Oregon Brew Crew to have an annual competition where the best of the club’s beers, regardless of style, would brewed and served by Widmer Brewing. In the spring of 1998, the first beer chosen was Scott Sander’s English Brown Ale but for whatever reasons, the Milk Stout was the first to be brewed by Widmer Brewing and was served in the summer of 1998.

This Stout became known as the Collaborator Stout and was an instant success. Over the years, this Collaborator beer has probably been brewed more often than all of the subsequent Collaborator beers combined. Its popularity was further boosted when it became the AHA’s Big Brew recipe for National Homebrew Day in 1999. That was surpassed when Widmer tweaked the original recipe and introduced the Collaborator Milk Stout as Snow Plow Stout in 2004 as their annual winter seasonal and won a GABF gold medal. Snow Plow Stout is Widmer’s best selling seasonal beer. Rob and Kurt honored the Brew Crew by including a short history of the Collaborator project and a Brew Crew Logo on the six pack holders.

All of this is not even the best part of the Collaborator Project. With every barrel of Collaborator beer that Widmer sells, they donate $1 to the Bob McCracken Scholarship Fund which supports students at the Oregon State University Fermentation Science program under the direction of Dr. Thomas Shellhammer.

To date, Widmer Brewing has donated over $5,000.

Walk in to the Widmer Gasthaus any time of the year and you’ll find a Collaborator beer or two on tap. If you can’t make it out to Portland, the Snow Plow Stout shows up on your grocer’s shelves in October.

Every year, more Collaborator beers are chosen during the annual competition held in May for Brew Crew members. Will your beer be the next Collaborator beer?

An article by Laurie Yadon entitled “Portland Collaborator Project” is listed in the table of contents of the March/April 2010 issue of Zymurgy as that issue’s “Online Extra”, which can be read on the AHA website. Thanks for a great article and great exposure for the Collaborator Project, Laurie!

An article written by Brew Crew member Laurie Yadon about her Collaborator brewing experience was published in the November/December 2009 issue of the MENSA BULLETIN, a magazine published by American Mensa for its 50,000+ members. A PDF file of the article (“The Brew Crew”) is available here (3Mb) courtesy of American Mensa, Ltd.

Beer	Brewer(s)	Date
Milk Stout – Now known as Snow Plow Stout	Ken Bietschek, Jeff Brinlee and Jeff Langley	Spring 1998
English Brown	Scott Sanders	Spring 1998
Belgian Dubbel	Committee	Fall 1998
Hallucinator English Old Ale	Gary Corbin, Michael Rasmussen	Spring 1999
Belgian-style Witbier	Noel Blake and Martin Wilde	Summer 1999
La Vie Belgian Pale Ale	Martin Wilde	Winter 1999
Bermuda Schwarzbier	Eric Dana	Spring 2000
Pre-Prohibition Lager	Curt Hausam	Summer 2000
Steel Bridge Porter	Noel Blake	Winter 2000
HB 25 Dunkles Bock	Mitch Scheele	Fall 2001
Hop Nation IPA	Matt Hollingsworth	Winter 2001
Scotch Ale	Ken Johnson	Spring 2002
Sled Crasher Winter Warmer	Noel Blake	Winter 2002
Moore Fearless Maibock	Ken Johnson, Preston Weesner	Spring 2003
Saul’s Stout	Ingmar Saul	Summer 2003
Saison Christophe	Chris Johnson, Bill Schneller	Spring 2004
Alpenhorn Vienna Lager	Mitch Scheele	Winter 2004
Hopnosis IPA	Brian Butenschoen	Spring 2005
Zephyr Kölsch	Dan Schultz	Summer 2005
Lagerhead Pilsner	Chris Johnson and Bill Schneller	Fall 2005
Big C Stout	Craig Edwards	Spring 2006
Ember Ale Smoked Porter	Jamie Dull	Fall 2006
Continuum Brown	Scott Sanders	Spring 2007
Rawkin Bock	Noel Blake	Summer 2007
Cascadian Dark Ale	Patrick Miller	Fall 2007
Altimate	Duane Younger	Winter 2008
Resurrection Rye	Patrick Miller	Spring 2008
Double River Doppelweizen	Jeffry Fisher	Fall 2008
Bike Town Nut Brown	Steven Lynch	Spring 2009
Eilean Dhu	Kelly Collins	Fall 2009