From synchro!judge-request at uu6.psi.com Sun Mar 13 06:26:05 1994 Received: from uu6.psi.com by goodman.itn.med.umich.edu with SMTP id AA16308 (5.65b/IDA-1.4.3 for spencer at hendrix.itn.med.umich.edu); Sun, 13 Mar 94 06:26:02 -0500 Received: from synchro.UUCP by uu6.psi.com (5.65b/4.0.071791-PSI/PSINet) via UUCP; id AA16557 for ; Sun, 13 Mar 94 05:58:43 -0500 Received: by synchro.com (smail2.5) id AA14062; 13 Mar 94 05:11:43 EST (Sun) Reply-To: judge at synchro.com (JudgeNet) Errors-To: judge-error at synchro.com Precedence: bulk Message-Id: <9403130511.AA14062 at synchro.com> From: judge-request at synchro.com (JudgeNet Administrator) To: judge-recipients at synchro.com (JudgeNet Recipients) Subject: JudgeNet Digest #711 (Mar 13, 1994) Date: 13 Mar 94 05:11:43 EST (Sun) JudgeNet Digest #711 Sun 13 Mar 1994 THE BEER JUDGE DIGEST Chuck Cox , digest administrator Michael Hall , archive administrator digest submissions to judge at synchro.com administrative requests to judge-request at synchro.com send rank updates to the administrative address messages sent to the wrong address will be ignored FTP archive information in /pub/judge/README on cygnus.ta52.lanl.gov Sponsored by SynchroSystems and the Riverside Garage & Brewery Contents: bottle types (Ed Hitchcock) Re: Knowing who made the beer ("Roger Deschner ") Re: Bottles and Judging (Bob Devine) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 12 Mar 1994 09:45:21 -0400 From: Ed Hitchcock Subject: bottle types Knowing the name of the brewer can influence your judgement. I have seen myself judge a beer a few points higher than it deserved because I knew the brewer made good beer. I later dropped the mark when I scored a better beer lower, but it did illustrate the problem to me. Allowing non-standard bottles doesn't affect your judgement per se, but suddenly realizing while you're judging pale ales that your best friend uses Orval bottles just like these... I think that is what the rule is for, not to prevent you from scoring a beer badly if it's in a corona bottle. ____________ Ed Hitchcock ech at ac.dal.ca | Oxymoron: Draft beer in bottles. | Anatomy & Neurobiology | Pleonasm: Draft beer on tap. | Dalhousie University, Halifax |___________________________________| ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 Mar 1994 08:40:58 CST From: "Roger Deschner " Subject: Re: Knowing who made the beer Well, John De Carlo has certainly kicked an interesting issue! I have to picture myself as judging a flight of beers, which for the sake of discussion contains several by unknowns and beers make by brewers I know and whom I know to be very good brewers - say Tony Babinec and Brian&Linda North. Despite my best efforts, if the North and Babinec beers were good, I'd probably give them a higher score than if I didn't know who made them. But on the other had, if they weren't so good (purely hypothetical, since I'm not sure either of these brewers are capable of making bad beer!) I'd probably give them a LOWER score than otherwise. In any case, I think the knowledge would interfere with impartial judging. Therefore, we need to continue to enforce the bottle rules, which aren't that onerous. The "right" bottles are readily available - brown, no-return, non-twistoff, long necks have become commonplace among micros; checking my fridge: Celis, Chicago (Legacy), Pecan St., Sam Adams, Indianapolis, and Bells are in competition-legal bottles. You don't need to drink bad beer anymore to get them. Or they can be picked up by the dozen after any competition. So bottle the rest of your batch in Grolsch bottles except for a few in legal bottles to be entered in competitions, and black out the caps with a marks-a-lot. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 Mar 1994 13:44:09 -0800 From: Bob Devine Subject: Re: Bottles and Judging John DeCarlo writes: | Is it really likely that if one or two of the bottles were | Grolsch-style, or in Corona (clear) bottles that it would affect the | judging? I don't see why, personally. | | Some people are able to identify their beers under the current | restrictions (bottle cap or bottle shape, primarily), though presumably | the judges judging the beer can't do so. | | IMNSHO, the bottle shape and color shouldn't matter to the judge. | | Plus, it is my understanding that if you are sure who made the beer | (from whatever clues there are) you would disqualify yourself from | judging that one if you felt "compromised". | | OTOH, to be really radical, I think it would be an interesting | experiment to let the judges see the brewer's name, beer name, and | recipe on each bottle as they judge. Has anyone ever tried something | like this to see if the judging was adversely affected? I prefer "anonymous bottles" rather than ones with the brewer's name or with distinctive shapes. The historical reason for requiring this is to prevent judging the bottle on reasons other than the beer inside. Suppose I know that someone always uses Bass bottles and I now happen to be judging an entry in such a bottle -- do I unconciously give a unfair favoratism to it? Do I judge this bottle based on what I remember of a previous tasting? While blatant favoratism would be difficult to justify on a 3-member judging panel, a few points one way or another might be easy to slip in on the +/- 7 spread. I'm currently in academia-land where I have occasion to be an anonymous reviewer of papers submitted to techical conferences. In that realm, it is the reverse of beer judging. The submissions are identified and the judges are unknown. This is permit the greatest amount of critical comments to emerge during reviews. However it is not unheard of to have a reviewer the aim or a paper and judge it on intention rather than actual contents. For beer competitions, I think that all judging should be done on a single bottle's value and accept the possibility of bad luck due to an occasionally unrepresentive bottle from a good batch. Bob Devine ------------------------------ End of JudgeNet Digest ************************