The CHAOS 1st Annual Fantasy Draft Competition

Hello CHAOS-ers,

This summer, I will be putting together a club-wide competition and invite as many of you as possible to join in! It will be quite a bit different from our BJCP style competitions, but will not take the place of our next one at all: it'll run concurrently to whichever next competition our coordinators think up.

The competition will revolve around a FANTASY (brewing) DRAFT. Based loosely on a fantasy sports draft, 10 to 12 teams of two brewers will be drafting ingredients to brew their very own BJCP-approved beer. Here are the basic rules (mostly lifted from the last one of these I did ):

1. Teams will be selected at random, made up of one Alchemist and one lower-tier member. This is to encourage a mix of experience levels and make sure everyone has access to the same equipment. Once I get things finalized with Brew & Grow, I can set the cap on number of teams. We want to have as many people participate as possible, but the ingredients list might put some restrictions on this. Teams will be finalized and announced two to three weeks before draft day. 

2. Teams will have seven draft picks, which means they will get a maximum (and minimum) of seven ingredients to work with. The categories to pick from will be Base Malt, Specialty Malt, Hops and Yeast. Teams must use all the ingredients they draft. Aside from water treatment, yeast nutrients, fining agents, priming sugar, etc., you will ONLY be able to use the ingredients you draft. No adjuncts, herbs, spices, wood, fruit, wild yeast or bacteria are allowed.

3. The draft will be a snake style draft, in which the team that picks first in the first round gets the last pick in the second round and so on and so on. Draft order will be randomly decided on the day of the draft. Teams will have two minutes each pick to select an ingredient, and once an ingredient is picked, it is unavailable for the rest of the teams to pick.

4. The draft will be seven rounds, but the last round will be a "wildcard" round. We'll redo the draft order for the final round and all ingredients will be available again. However, once an ingredient is picked in the wildcard round, it can't be picked again. There are no rules about which order you have to select your ingredients, but you can only draft one yeast and must draft at least one base malt. 

5. If you pick a specialty grain, you must use at least 4 oz of it in your beer. If you draft a hop, you must use at least one ounce of it in your beer. 

6. Ingredients cannot be altered by teams in any way, i.e. roasting/smoking grain. If you want smoked malt, draft it. You can't make your own for this competition.

7. Teams that select base grains from multiple regions, like pilsner malt (German, Belgian, American) can use any variety they want. 

8. The list of ingredients will be announced ahead of the draft, somewhere between one to two weeks beforehand.

9. One team member must be present at the draft and you MUST have a team name. Be creative and have fun with this name. 

10. Team members must brew together and the beer must be brewed at CHAOS. The submission date for the competition will be eight weeks after the draft date.

11. Submissions must include a beer name, declared BJCP style upon which the beer will be judged against, and will consist of two 12 oz bottles. Same rules as your standard BJCP homebrewing competition. 

If I can find a brewery willing to partner with us to brew the winning beer with the winning team, that will happen. I'll get working on the details for that as soon as I get confirmation that there's enough interest to do this thing. All dates will depend on this, and I will try to get everything set in stone as soon as possible. I'd like to do the draft some time in early June, which would place the submission deadline in early August. I'll create a sign-up document soon and post it. Registration will close some time in May to give me time to make teams and finalize things with Brew & Grow. 

I would love some help organizing this, particularly from those of you with experiencing organizing a BJCP-sanctioned competition before, so if you're interested in helping out with the planning and logistics, shoot me a message. 

Also, it's entirely possible I have missed out on some critical explanation, so please please please hit me with any and all questions you have. Together we can create one hell of a competition, something that is fun enough to become a yearly CHAOS tradition!

-Alex