February 27th, 2010 marked the date of the Boston Homebrew Competition, hosted annually by the Boston Wort Processors, one of the oldest homebrewing clubs in the United States, and sponsored by your friendly neighborhood brewery, CBC. Out of 361 entries, with dozens of beer styles represented from Doppelbocks to Scotch Ales, Baltic Porter to Russian Imperial Stout, American Double I.P.A. to Flanders Red and Belgian Oude Bruin, one beer was chosen as Best of Show. That beer, surprisingly enough, was a simple Cream Ale brewed by Jack Fuqua of Zionsville, Indiana. After multiple emails back and forth, confirming recipe details, securing the exact ingredients – malts, hops, yeast strains – used in the original brew, Jack flew up to Cambridge and arrived at 6am on July 23rd to join the Brew Crew at the kettle. Scaling up a homebrew recipe of five gallons to the 310 gallons of the average CBC-sized batch isn’t as simple as just multiplying by 60. But we’re pretty sure that Jack enjoyed mixing together the 200 gallons of near-boiling water and 495 pounds of malt with the trusty CBC paddle to make our mash. A combination of pilsner malts from the U.S. and Germany combined to make a pale golden brew that still offered some light but sweet grainy complexity, and the addition of flaked rice in the mash contributed towards a more well-attenuated beer with a creamy body. U.S.-grown Liberty hops offered a gentle bitterness to the finish and just a hint of floral hoppiness to the aroma. Fermentation was carried out with a famous yeast strain, though one which had until now never been used in the tanks at CBC: the famous California Ale Yeast #001, also known as Chico Ale Yeast from the famous Sierra Nevada Brewery in Chico, California. Known for low temperature tolerance and for creating a super-clean beer with little fruitiness or esters, the beer was fermented at 62*F for just under a week, followed by three and a half weeks of lagering at freezing temperatures. The resulting beer is many things at once. It is a marvelously clean, simple, quaffable beer, perfect for knocking back on a warm, late summer day. Give this beer just a little more attention, however, and the complexities of cereal flavors from malt and rice come through, followed by a delicate grassy hop note which just peeks out over this crisp, elegant ale. Some consumers may scoff at Cream Ale as representative only of retro-hip blandness, and find it odd that CBC, brewers of all sorts of malt-based oddities, would choose this beer as a best-of-show brew. As brewers, however, we recognize that quite often the truest test of the skills of a real brewer is not in the biggest, brawniest, over-the-top brew he or she can produce. We’re of the opinion that you could hide a dead cat in most double I.P.A.’s or bourbon-barrel Imperial Stouts. No, a real challenge is in crafting a small batch beer of incomparable delicateness, with nowhere to hide unbalanced bitterness or an out of style ester or phenol.