Date: Wed, 15 Jan 1997 10:12:01 -0500
Message-Id: <199701151512.KAA02903 at synchro.com>
From: owner-judge-digest at synchro.com
To: judge-digest at synchro.com
Subject:   judge-digest V1 #1368
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judge-digest             Wednesday, 15 January 1997     Volume 01 : Number 1368

 ============================================================================
       J u d g e N e t   -   t h e   b e e r   j u d g e   d i g e s t
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 Moderator:        Chuck Cox          <chuck at synchro.com>
 Archivist:        Spencer Thomas     <spencer at umich.edu>
 Publisher:        SynchroSystems     <info at synchro.com>

 Submissions:      judge at synchro.com
 Administration:   judge-request at synchro.com
 Archive:          http://realbeer.com/spencer/judge
 BJCP info:        geninfo at bjcp.synchro.com

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 contents:

 Re: Commercial Competition Thread
 Re: World Cup vs. GABF
 BJCP Professional Comp
 RE: Local commercial competitions
 Forthcoming Elections

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Sullivan51 at aol.com
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 07:41:32 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: Commercial Competition Thread

John Carlson writes:

>Now some individuals out there want to explore the possibility of the BJCP
hosting >a commercial competition!  Are you kidding?  Who in this
organization would do the >work?   Does anyone recommending this proposed
competition have any idea of the
>logistics involved in such an event? 

Good questions.   I believe that the GABF has some full time personnel to
work with plus many advertising dollars from some of the big boy breweries
involved.  That certainly makes it a lot easier doesn't it.  Regarding the
logistics... well it's not impossible but just think about the logistics
involved in a homebrew competition (100 to 300 entries).   That's also a lot
of hard work but on a much, much smaller scale.   I know of the problems
involved in doing a small competition correctly.  I cannot imagine what doing
a large one would be like.  

John then writes:

>Maybe the BJCP should focus on getting a homebrew scoresheet developed,
>official style guidelines drafted, exams administered & graded, pins
produced,
>personal judging records updated and newsletters mailed instead of wasting
>time pondering a hypothetical competition that will in all probability never
even get >off the ground.

I think the BJCP has been trying to focus on these things.  This is Judge Net
not the BJCP.  I think that hypothetical things should be pondered,
discussed, debunked, etc.   Any waste of time is personal.  You cannot waste
my time, only yours.

Randy Paul responds to my last posting:

> A good debate on what the best homebrew judges think *should* be the
criteria will
>make us better judges.  How can that hurt?

It cannot hurt, but why would commercial breweries want to be involved in a
project to make us better judges?  They have a lot to lose but little to
gain.

Jim Cave responds to the commercial competition thread:

> I believe the the local general public should be informed about the quality
of the >new, wide range of beers they are being offered.

That's a nice thought, but is it the BJCP's job (mission) to do that?  Even
if this pie in the sky competition were to get off the ground, the best you
could do is tell everyone who won according to our criteria.  You couldn't
tell the public whose beers suck.  You wouldn't get many entrants who would
take the chance that their beer finished at the bottom of the heap and have
it published.  If you want to do something like this, you might take the
approach that Consumer Reports did, but then you end up with a lot of silly
nonsense like Old Milwaukee being the best beer in America.  Or was it silly?
 See my last paragraph below.  The difference is that Consumer Reports can do
this without the participation of the breweries and they also have longevity
and a reputation that allows them to get away with this.   The BJCP does not
have this reputation among the public at large or even beer drinkers at
large.

A better project to illustrate what the BJCP does and what the commercial
breweries are looking for would go as follows.  Set up two panels for each
flight.  One panel would consist of BJCP judges who would use a standard
scoresheet to judge each beer according to the guidelines for the style that
the brewery enter it into.   The other panel consists of people who have a
taste for such beer but have no knowledge of beer judging, homebrewing,
flaws, etc.  These people are easy to find.  Their scoresheets would
basically just consist of questions like: Aroma:  Excellent, Good, Fair,
Poor.  When the judging of both panels is finished, compare the judges scores
and comments to that of the other panel.   Joe Brewer would not be much
interested in what your scores and comments are, but he would be interested
in the comments of the inexperienced group.  That group represents the
mainstream and Joe Brewer could give a damn about your scores if people will
buy his beer.  Then you have to ask yourself, when the scores of both panels
are far apart;  who needs to be educated?

John Sullivan - St. Louis

------------------------------

From: Scott Bickham <bickham at dave.nrl.navy.mil>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 09:59:06 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: World Cup vs. GABF

John Carlson wrote:

> BTW, the major difference
> between the Great Amercian Beer Festival (GABF) and the World Beer Cup
> (WBC) is that the WBC was open to international entries as well as domestic
> and did not have a public component to it (i.e. festival) as the GABF does.

Actually, a more important difference is that well over half of the WBC 
entries recieve awards - gold, silver or bronze medals.  So essentially,
for the price of the entry fee, the brewers can advertise that their beer
was a "medal winner", when in fact the beer may not be a very good example
of the style.  The GABF, on the other hand, is a true competition, with
the top beers rated in each category.  I have a problem with the WBC,
since it obviously does not take much effort to win a bronze medal
(unlike most wine competitions) and the results are being used in a
way that is misleading to the consumer.

Scott

------------------------------

From: "Mark S. Johnston" <msjohnst at talon.net>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 20:15:19 -0500
Subject: BJCP Professional Comp

Dave Houseman tossed out the idea of a BJCP-run version of the GABF Blind
Tasting. There have been a number of very good points brought up regarding
the logistics of such an endeavor, and more than one comment implying that
it's not the place of the BJCP to get involved in the commercial beer
world. The arguement of the latter statement is that as homebrew judges,
we don't know all of the dynamics that a commercial brewer has to deal
with, or we are too much a group of "style nazis" who cannot accept
variance in our perception of what would be a good beer.

Being that the impetus for the proposal is an apparant dissatisfation with
GABF results, this arguement, from the brewers' perspective, may have some
merit. People who question how Beer A could have possibly beat out Beer B
in a given category (I know I have), must consider the possibility that
some brewers produce single, special batches for GABF entry. As one brewer
recently told me, "The only purpose of medals is for marketing." It is
this philosophy that produces the World Beer Championships. Send your beer
with $85, and if it's not infected, you can market a bronze medal at the
very least. The general public really doesn't understand, so the plethora
of medals out there must mean there's some really great brew about (g).

As to the ability of BJCP judges to appreciate professional situations and
efforts, I will use myself as an example. For over a year I participated
on a tasting panel for The Malt Advocate magazine. We would perform blind
tastings of up to 12 beers of a given style, and rate them on a 100 point
scale. The results were published as a Buyer's Guide. The panel also
consisted of a couple of beer writers, and occasionally a professional
brewer or other industry figure. 

As a rule, my scores were 5 to 10 points lower than the rest of the panel.
Perhaps my perspective was off. I was critiquing the beer, looking for
flaws on occasion. While the "curve" from high to low was usually in synch
with the rest of the panel, they tended to provide rave reviews of beer
that I found to be marginal.

The upside to this was that it gave me a vast exposure to beers and styles
I would not have otherwise experienced, and has made me a better judge for
the effort. (A debatable point, perhaps.) In general, though, I believe
that the judging community would have to redirect our way of approaching
beer evaluation if we intend to gain acceptance by the pro's. The other
side of this coin may be that they have to appreciate our search for
perfection in brewing. 

BTW-FWIW: I once slipped a homebrewed Imperial Stout into the panel
tasting. The later-slack-jawed panelists gave it a 90--second only to
Courage Imperial Russian Stout, and beating out Samuel Smiths. I'd say
these guys knew what they were doing. ;-)


------------------------------

From: Robert Paolino <rpaolino at execpc.com>
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 1997 00:26:07 -0600 (CST)
Subject: RE: Local commercial competitions

On Thu, 9 Jan 1997 Jim Cave <CAVE at PSC.ORG> wrote:
> Subject: Judging of Commercial beers....
> 
> 	I was thinking of something similar a few weeks ago.  I believe the 
> the local general public should be informed about the quality of the new, 
> wide range of beers they are being offered.  The craft brewed beers "took off"
> a couple of years ago in British Columbia and there is a lot of mediocre 
> product.  I thought the local judges could rate the local beers and publish the 
> results in some way, provide point scores or ribbon categories.  Since the 
> judges would be independent of the brewing community, nepotism would be 
> more restricted.  Also, as the results would be published, there would be an
> incentive for breweries to improve.

I would be _very_ careful about this sort of thing in that it could damage
good relations with your local brewers.

Sad to say, it's been a little more than a couple years since my most
recent visit to your beautiful province (1994?) but even then there were
some good (and some mediocre) beers out there, some of which were long
(relatively speaking)-established and others brand new.  Although the good
and mediocre appeared to be independent of age of the brewery (and too
small a sample to demonstrate a statistical association anyway), it's
certainly not uncommon for a new brewer to have a few problems to work
out.  At that stage in a brewery's life, comments perceived as unduly
harsh can put a fizzle in the takeoff of the real beer industry in the
region. 

I would strongly recommend against ribbons and awards, and would even shy
away from published scores.  I could see a place for descriptive comments
being published, with the consumer being given the opportunity to make
what she will of them based on individual preferences.  But you don't want
to be in the position of making rankings and awards.

The idea that the judging could provide an "incentive to improve" is
unrealistic as a practical matter.  Better to educate the public about
appreciating real beer and let things shake out as they will as people
come to demand better beers.  The serious beer folk will start to abandon
the mediocre ones, but I dare say that even the mediocre ones will have
their place because they will still be far more flavourful (yet
unthreatening) than the industrial swillseners and will introduce
recovering swillers to real beer.  Eventually they, too, will demand
better as their tastes evolve. 

I'm sceptical about awards anyway.  We conduct one of the oldest regional
beer festivals in North America and we steadfastly refuse to make it a
competition (although there were awards given, against some people's
better judgment I'm told, in one of the early years of the fest.  It was
long before I ever set foot in this town, so I can't comment on the
details). A few brewers would love for us to give awards (no doubt for
marketing purposes), but in general we see the possibility of more
negative things coming out of doing it.  We'd prefer to keep a relaxed
atmosphere to the event, concentrate on educating people in enjoying a
variety of beers, and keeping good relations with and among the
exhibitors.  Although I can see _some_ value in competitions on a national
scale, I think it could be destructive at a local level. 

Besides, there are enough variables that could affect what gets to you at
the judging table that making awards among competitors in a local market
is a bad idea.  It's one thing not to get an award when there are two
dozen entries in a style drawn from across the country, but quite another
when a brewer has one of the two "un-awarded" local pale ales out of the
five entries.  A couple of examples.  When I was last in British Columbia,
one of the local brewers had two very nice beers on draught in local pubs.
The same two beers were completely different (infected) in the bottles I
later purchased.  Example #2: Members of our club were approached by the
local weekly to participate in a blind tasting of beers from the region
(and, as it turned out, they had it in mind to narrow the region to mean
_local_ beers). From the start we insisted that it would be a qualitative
tasting, not a "competition" with rankings made of a relatively small
sample of beers. One thing we discovered, though, was that the samples put
before us varied widely in how they were handled at some point in their
distribution.  When told of the identities of the beers after the tasting,
we simply didn't recognise some of them because they were in such bad
shape.  (We insisted on a second tasting, with additional styles included
to expand the sample and to make the overall selection less susceptible to
the "random" problems we encountered with the first set) Part of the
problem was in the writer's selection of beers (one was a winter seasonal
still on the shelves of one store in June), but for others we simply
couldn't say whether the problem was inconsistency on the part of the
brewery, poor handling by the distributor, or display conditions in the
store.  Maybe it's fair game if that's how the product gets to the
consumer, but when you're dealing with a small "n" in your competition, do
you want your awards to amount to the "crapshoot" so often commented upon
in homebrew competitions?  (Who knows, maybe a solution is to have
multiple entries of the same beers all obtained from different places?)

Anyway, that ought to give you a few things to think about and comment
upon....


Now go have a beer,


Bob Paolino                                  rpaolino at earth.execpc.com
Madison
Have a beer today... for your palate and for good health
Vice President, Madison Homebrewers and Tasters Guild
For information, write to us at mhtg at stdorg.wisc.edu


------------------------------

From: Dennis Davison <ddavison at execpc.com>
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 1997 23:47:59 -0600
Subject: Forthcoming Elections

Just a reminder that you have two weeks left to get your nominations in
for the following region. Remember you need to get signatures from five
judges in your region and they must be received by Russ Wigglesworth by
Feb 1.

Midwest IL,IN,IA,KS,MI,MN,MO,NE,ND,SD,WI  

Mid-Atlantic DE,DC,KY,MD,NJ,OH,PA,VA,WV 

Southeast AL,GA,MS,NC,SC,TN 

West CA,NV,HA                  


On another note, I'm still looking for at least four people to serve on
the election committee. These individuals can reside in one of these
regions, however they will tally votes from one of the other regions.
Basically, you need to be able to receive up to 200 pieces of mail and
count the votes. Simple and easy. Any takers?

- -- 
Dennis Davison				mailto:ddavison at execpc.com	

		BJCP Representative for the Midwest
			BJCP President

http://www.execpc.com/~ddavison/bjcp.html

------------------------------

End of judge-digest V1 #1368
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