Last year on JudgeNet, Bob Wolff posted the following question in a submission:
>WHY ALL-GRAIN ENTRIES AND ENTRIES MADE FROM CANS, KITS,DRYMALT, ETC INCLUDING PARTIAL GRAIN
>JUDGED IN THE SAME CONTEST? It surely takes more work, skill and time to produce a product using all-grain than
>it does the others. For those of you who haven't tried all-grain brewing this may not be a fair question-but, my opinion is that
>the two should not be judged together. All the work has been done when you do extract brewing, including the recipe.
This kind of proposition really hits a nerve in me and this was my response to Bob Wolff's question:
I believe that all-grain and extract-based beers should be judged together. I strongly disagree that there is necessarily a great gulf between all-grain and extract beers. I would say that in general, an all-grain beer will almost always be better than a kit beer brewed according to the directions on the can, but that is not how the majority of extract brewers in my experience make their beer. There are many things that brewers can do to improve their beer other than mashing the grain themselves. All the work has not been done for you just because you use extract rather than all-grain. Recipe formulation is just as important in either case and an all-grain brewer can bypass the recipe formulation process by using a published recipe just as easily as an extract brewer.
There are many facets of the brewing process that determine the quality and qualities of the beer produced other than whether a beer was made from canned or dry malt extract or extract produced from the mashing of grains by the brewer. All-grain beers win prizes over those brewed from extract for many reasons, not just because of the fact that they were brewed from grain. All-grain brewers generally have an overall better brewing process including hopping schedules, better yeast cultures (liquid yeast), full wort boil, rapid wort cooling (wort chiller), temperature control (spare brewing refrigerator with thermostat), and just plain experience. Each of these, along with mashing, gives the brewer more control over the brewing process and will result in better beers. All of these things are not restricted to all-grain brewing and can be done by an extract brewer. In my brewing, I do all of the above except for mashing and I don't yet have a spare refrigerator for brewing, but each time I introduced one of the items above (bought a ten gallon brew pot, built a wort chiller, ...), I noticed the improvement in my beer. Beers brewed in this way can easily rival those made from grain with a careful choice of extract and the use of specialty grains. I also use only unhopped light malt extracts, and prefer those that tell what grains the extract was made from, such as those sold (made?) by William's Brewing. With that kind of information, there can be very little difference between all-grain and extract beers, both in quality and in the control over the brewing process.
I feel so strongly about this that I don't even sell hopped malt extracts in my homebrewing supply business. Instead, I promote a process which gives the brewer the most control over the results of his or her brewing and provide the information with which they can use that control to produce beers that they are happy with. [Note: For several reasons several months ago I decided to discontinue operating Moonstruck Brewing as a homebrewing supply business and I am currently in the process of liquidating my remaining inventory.]
Please don't take the comments above to infer that I have anything against all-grain brewing, and in fact I have a lot of respect for those who do it. I would like to be brewing from grain myself, but I have enough demands on my time and have too little with which to brew already, so I have improved (and am continuing to improve) my brewing process by doing everything that I can without adding the extra time and effort involved with mashing and sparging.
While there are definitely differences between the time and effort involved in brewing from grain and from extract, those differences can be minimized to a great extent and there is little reason to separate them in competitions. I wouldn't care if additional awards were given to the best extract beer and the best all-grain beer in a competition, but the additional judging requirements would probably make this prohibitive. Also, how would you categorize partial mash recipes if extract and all-grain beers were judged separately? Where would you draw the line? Extract beers do take awards over all-grain beers, but if you feel that all-grain brewers take too many prizes at the expense of extract brewers, or if you feel that all-grain and extract beers should be judged separately, you are free to run your competition that way or hold an all-grain-only, extract-only, or even kit-only competition.