Well, we learned an important lesson with this one. Brew early and often, and taste your beers well in advance of submitting them to the competition .

We followed none of these rules for the beehive brew off and suffered the consequences. Our barleywine actually tasted quite good, but had zero carbonation. Not surprisingly, we got judged a 26.5 out of 50 which was not as bad as I expected after tasting the beer myself. The judges were spot on though, and noted several key aspects of the beer that suffered due to the lack of carbonation.

As to why this batch failed to carbonate, I have no idea. This is the first time it has happened in all of my years of brewing. Luckily, all is not lost. When our keg of mead runs dry, we can just pour all of the barleywine bottles into the keg and carbonate with ease. Crisis averted.