My BJCP Exam Results

... are in and I'm officially a certified BJCP judge! A year of studying the style guidelines, tasting many many hundreds of classic examples, and writing an ungodly number of practice scoresheets paid off. I scored in the eighties, which is good enough to take me up to a national judge but not quite what I'd need to hit the master level. I'm thrilled to have scored that well.

I owe a great debt of thanks to one James Lewis who organized and taught the class, as well as my classmates from CHAOS and Square Kegs for keeping it fun. (Sampling 5-10 beers every three weeks under the critical lens of the style guidelines gets a little harder than one might expect...)

Onward to the summer competition circuit and to the two competitions Square Kegs will be putting on this year: Überbrew and Winterbrew!

My First Foray Into Judging

My homebrew club, Square Kegs, hosted our second annual Winterbrew competition back in the end of January. Jeremy and I had the awesome opportunity to work with the member of our club organizing the competition on a lot of the behind the scenes logistics and to actually judge a couple of flights as we're both taking a BJCP study course currently.

My experience with competitions up to this point had been simple: go online, fill out a form, send / drop off some beer, get a scoresheet back, read said scoresheet and go "hmm, ok. I guess that guy [loved my beer and has the best palate ever! || hated my beer because he doesn't know shit!] (Optionally pat myself on the back for a good score or good feedback.)

This year was really different. There is a ton of work that goes on behind the scenes and ahead of time to prepare. Beer needs to be cellared and cataloged for easy retrieval by the stewards. The flights need to be well organized by category for the judges. Little things like the type of plastic cup, mechanical pencils instead of wood and lighting all matter. From the outside it seems like it'd be a rocking good time : hundreds of beers to try and the judges just "have" to power their way through them in a few hours. Cue mental image of a bunch of beer geeks having a party. Not so. It's a serious, well-organized, highly focused endeavor.

Now The biggest insights I gained were into the actual process of judging. I had a preconceived notion which was largely blown away by reality. Firstly, it's highly subjective and hence really difficult. As a judge, you have about 15 minutes to taste each beer. You taste about 8-10 beers per flight. The beers vary in style, either just a bit for a large, popular category like IPA or immensely for wide-open categories like specialty or vegetable, herb and spice.

I think it's different for really experienced judges who have really calibrated their palates, but as a novice I was evaluating a beer against a written description of what it should be. No matter how elegantly written the BJCP styles are, it's still tough to translate written words into a sensory experience.

This might also change with experience, but I was pretty surprised by the varying sensitivity to different flavors, aromas and off-flavors. I am pretty sensitive to acetaldehyde, but apparently I can't detect diacetyl if it's smacking me in nose.

Finally, I was very surprised at how collaborative the judging process actually is. Often times if there's a wide spread in scores, the judges will discuss the beer and come to an agreement. The goal is to get scores within a somewhat narrow range, but one judge usually adjusts theirs up or down to get there. So the initial feedback about a beer might not really match up to the score it ended up with.

I came away with a whole new respect for the process and a few considerations for entering competitions:

• If I enter a Belgian, it will not have overwhelming hot alcohol or phenolic (band-aid, hot-dog, nasty) notes. Belgian Styles ≠ I'll just let this ferment however hot it wants too and call it a Belgian!
• If I enter a spice beer, I'll use a tincture or some other controlled means of adding the space after the beer is done fermenting. Or I'll split the batch and blend it back. Far too many of the beers I tasted had massive, overwhelming spice character.
• I'll be really careful about categorization and specifying the base category on anything specialty. It's really hard to judge a beer if you have absolutely no idea what it is...

First Medal!

Jeremy and have entered beers in two competitions so far this year. (We also helped to run one that our club, Square Kegs, put on. That's another post.)

That's a medal all right. More nerdy photos on instagram

We entered a handful of beers in both and won our first official medal! It's definitely a proud moment, particularly given the size of the Drunk Monk Challenge competition this year (806 entries) and the size of the Porter Category (29). We brewed the Robust Porter recipe out of Brewing Classic Styles and took third place with a score of 34.

Interestingly, we also entered the same beer in our Winterbrew competition and scored a 32.5 a month ago. The judges notes were all generally aligned, but I was particularly impressed by the feedback from a master judge who picked out the one major process flaw in the beer. We brewed on December 1st here in Chicago and ended up mashing at 151F instead of our target of 154F. (It gets cold here. We use coolers and a single infusion. For now.)

Empirically, we're getting better as brewers. The beers we entered in competition last year averaged high twenties with one outlier in the high thirties. This year, we're averaging mid-thirties.

Here's a recap of our entries and scores:

Winterbrew 2013:

Munich Helles: 34
Robust Porter: 32.5
Rye Pale Ale: 32
Russian Imperial Stout: 32.3

Drunk Monk: 

Robust Porter: 34
Russian Imperial Stout: 24
* I'm fairly certain that we mis-categorized the stout by not entering it as a wood-aged beer. It was in a 5 gallon whiskey barrel for a month and interestingly enough, won a club competition which coincided with Goose Island's Quest for the Imperial Goose.

Brewing Through the Styles

I've previously posted about how I started brewing through the BJCP styles using recipes in Brewing Classic Styles. (I also got on a soapbox about where styles don't matter. That's a separate topic.) The idea at the outset was to get to know ingredients better and to have a long list of recipes to work through while we're sorting out our process and equipment.

Within the past year, we've brewed a eight recipes out of that book. In no particular order: IPA, Octoberfest, English Ordinary Bitter, English Barleywine, Imperial IPA, Russian Imperial Stout (3x), Saison, and American Brown Ale.

I'm liking the process. These are not complex recipes, but it's amazing to see the different end products. The yeast character and phenolics that we got out of the saison (after fighting with that Belgian strain from Wyeast) are amazing. The fact that it only takes 5% chocolate malt out of a massive grain bill on a Russian Imperial Stout to make the beer completely opaque and have a pronounced, massive chocolate flavor is still pretty amazing to me.

I definitely don't understand anywhere close to all of the chemistry behind it, but I am starting to wrap my head around the fact that the flavors we pick out in food and beer are just specific chemical compounds that can be created or broken down by parts of the fermentation process or occur naturally in our ingredients.

One of the things which really helped to crystalize that notion in my mind was trying a couple of beers with non-traditional ingredients at my last club meeting. One had maple syrup and the other had cocoa powder. Neither beer tasted particularly like the highlighted ingredient. It's totally counterintuitive at first, but adding an ingredient to the beer pre-fermentation will probably not produce the end result you think it will. Which brings me full circle - rather than experimenting with non traditional ingredients, I'd highly recommend learning what the traditional ones contribute.

The Evolution of a Palate (Continued)

I was out last night with a few friends and ordered a bottle of Firestone Walker's Union Jack IPA. This is definitely one of my favorite beers and one that I'd say I know well. Unfortunately, this one tasted a bit off. The hop aromatics had largely dropped out, leaving a sharp bitterness and some yeast / malt character behind without the balancing notes which make the beer so good.

I don't fault Firestone for this one - I'm guessing that the offender was the bar which served the beer and that they sat on their inventory for a while prior to serving it and may not have stored it properly. (We had multiple bottles and they all exhibited the same characteristics.)

But the fact that I noticed this and neither the fiance nor the other person drinking the beer did is just the latest example of a somewhat disturbing trend that both Jeremy and I have noticed lately. After making the jump up to all grain, getting really critical of our own beers and starting to really notice the contributions of different ingredients in finished beers, I'm starting to pick out off-flavors and imperfections in commercial beers in a way which I haven't previously.

And I'm not saying this as a "beer snob" or to say that I have some freakishly evolved palette which is capable of picking out every flavor in every beer. I'm saying this as someone who loves to drink beer who is now finding it more difficult to genuinely enjoy a really wide spectrum of commercial beers despite their imperfections which I just never noticed before. This isn't necessarily a good thing. (Outside of the Cicerone or BJCP courses of study, which I have been thinking about pursuing. But I know that I can easily get caught up in being esoteric and I don't want to indulge that here...)

Anybody else out there notice this?

Mexican Hot Chocolate Stout (Scoresheet review)

As per my previous post, I'm going to taste each beer Jeremy and entered in competition this winter against the score sheets we got back. Hopefully paying attention to the feedback from the bjcp judges and making some tweaks will help us to get better.

Since the Mexican Hot Chocolate Stout is still on my main tap handle downstairs I decided to lead off with it.

The score sheet I got back on this one is online here.

My notes:

Aroma
Judges' Notes: Malty, slightly spicy, lightly roasted malt in the background, lack of carbonation hurts

My Notes: Bready, sweet, slightly peppery / yeasty, some very slight green apple

Appearance
Judges' Notes: No carbonation, clear, mahogany
My Notes: Jet black / opaque with tan, lingering head

Flavor
Judges' Notes: Munich breadiness, minimal hop flavor, no hot chocolate flavor, phenolic, minimal spiciness from peppers 
My Notes: Sweet, green apple flavor persists, finishes with some roast bitterness and lingering sweetness (presumably from the lactose in the mexican hot chocolate used)

Mouthfeel 
Judges' Notes: No carbonation, light body, minimal astringency
My Notes: Light, moderate carbonation, slightly "slick" (I'm guessing from the lactose or milkfat)

Overall
Judges' Notes: Lack of carbonation really hurt the beer, malt bill was not quite stout-like, more pepper would have been desirable.
My Notes: I missed the mark on this one. The underlying recipe was good, but I think next time around I'll use more of the hot chocolate spices (chile, cinnamon, cacao nib) and skip the actual hot chocolate. I also get a distinct, but not overpowering acetaldehyde flavor from this one. It'll get more time in the fermentor with a temperature bump next time around.

Score: 21

One of the things which stood out in all of the results from this competition was that our carbonation was off. The Blichmann beer gun is an awesome device, but I don't think we quite have the process dialed in with it. I'm going to experiment with it on the next couple of batches we do in order to get an appropriate level of carbonation. It's good in the keg, but it seems like some is getting lost in the bottling process.

The other changes I'll make on this one are upping the chocolate and roasted malts and using a spice blend instead of actual Mexican Hot Chocolate.