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...

Water Basics

I had the opportunity to talk about the basics of water as it relates to brewing with the soon to be founder of Panic Brewing at the last Square Kegs meeting. Rather than re-writing the whole talk, I've posted the notes here. Gary took the liberty of adding some of the more technical details based on his education at the American Brewers Guild.

You can check it out here.

Templeton Rye English Barleywine Group Brew

So, I've got some more Instagrammy beer porn for you here. Gary (aka Panic Brewing) from my homebrew club Square Kegs mentioned a few meetings back that he had a couple of Templeton Rye barrels just sitting in his basement. And being a good homebrewer / soon to be pro brewer, he decided that he'd organize a group brew of English Barleywine. Jeremy and I immediately jumped on the chance and brewed up ten gallons even though we had to struggle to figure out fermentation space.

More on the end product in six months or so. I am a little jealous Gary is the one sampling it to gauge how it's aging out...

It's Already Old News, But...

Tony Magee's announcement that Lagunitas is planning to open up a production brewery right here in Chicago is big news for both Chicago's burgeoning craft beer scene and particularly for the long list of brewery startups seem to be in various early stages of getting beer onto retailers' shelves.

I recently put faces and names to two of the startups on that list at the last Square Kegs meetings I attended - Gary of Panic Brewing and Jerry of Uné Anee Brewery. I'd met both guys at prior meetings and found their breweries on the internet independently of talking to them. They're both pretty experienced brewers, both have invested in professional brewing education, and both seem like pretty genuinely good guys. I'm rooting for both of them to succeed.

And I think that Lagunitas coming here is going to make it just a bit easier on them. Sure, they'll be competing for taps and shelf space with a really well-established player in the market who can produce more beer in a single brew cycle than some of the nano / startup breweries will in a month or a year. But that doesn't really matter all that much compared to what Lagunitas could and hopefully will do for the supply chain and other related businesses that a production brewery relies on.

For example, one of the biggest cost factors in running a brewery is freight. Tony gave that as his singular cost justification to build this massive brewery. Grain has to get from a farmer to a supplier and ultimately to a brewery. That takes a lot of diesel. The same goes for bottles and then for finished beer it's basically the opposite process. The raw materials are cheap, but the freight adds a lot of cost in to the equation. (To put it on a homebrew scale, it costs ~$15 to ship a $50 sack of grain from Northern Brewer to my office in Northbrook.)

Having some big production breweries based right here is going to make it far more attractive for those grain suppliers to throw a single pallet of malt on the back of a full truck or to open facilities closer. It's going to make it easier for Windy City Distribution or Glunz Beer to buy more trucks, pay more sales reps and pick up the new startups with that extra capacity. Every successful (and particularly large and successful) brewery that opens has a positive impact of the ecosystem that supports the industry.

So I'm really excited about this announcement. Not only because I'll be able to go buy growlers of some of my favorite beer, but also because this is a huge leap in Chicago becoming a world class beer city with amazing local breweries dominating our tap handles. Hopefully in five or six years, Jeremy and I will be able to buy a used 15 barrel system off of somebody local who's outgrown it, take advantage of the great infrastructure that's grown to support our local beer industry and have a little bit easier of a time launching a dream because of the people who paved the way for us.

Firestone Union Jack in Chicago!

I've been a huge fan of the Firestone Walker beers for a while now. One of my best friends was out in San Luis Obispo for a few years for work and turned me on to their products while you could still only get them in California, Nevada and Utah. I'm pretty sure that in my nascent appreciation for craft beer I read an article in one of GQ or Esquire which named it the best beer in America as well.

In any case, my buddy was nice enough enough to smuggle some bottles home every time he was back in Chicago and then continue to do so when he swung back through California after relocating back to Chicago. So up until last January, I only had occasion to drink their beers on very rare occasions. Thankfully, they released the proprietor's reserve series here and made the Double Jack and Walker's Reserve available here in 22's and on draft.

And now as of a month or so ago, they've released Union Jack in both six packs and on draft. I am a happy Firestone fanboy. It's definitely my go-to house IPA when I don't have one of my own on tap.

After the homebrew club meeting last week, a handful of us ended up at the Bad Apple which happened to have Union Jack on draft. Most of the guys hadn't tasted it previously, but by the time the little lady and I left the better portion of our group was drinking it.

Well done Firestone crew. Now you guys just need to figure out how to get the Double Barrel Ale out here!

My Local Homebrew Club

After a summer of intense learning and brewing, joining a club stood out as one of the things which I hadn't started to do yet. It just so happens that there's a club literally in my neighborhood and one of the guys who started it owns a small (non-beer related) store which I frequent on a regular basis.

Last night I finally made it to a meeting and even convinced the fiance to come with. (Luckily for me, she not only tolerates the massive amount of brewing stuff at the house but she actually is a huge craft and homebrew fan who has pretty extensive knowledge at this point. Subject for another post.) I was pleasantly surprised at the number of brewers in attendance, the range of skill levels, and that they're holding a competition in January.

There was a short presentation by a BJCP judge on the different style categories and what to expect when entering your beer in competition, followed by a hour and change of socializing and trying other brewers' beers. This is definitely the fun part. It's awesome to talk to so many other brewers in a concentrated, in person setting and to try so many other home-brewed beers and listen to the brewers talk about how they made them.

I'll definitely be entering the last of the Octoberfest we brewed in September, a lambic that's been aging since June and possibly the double IPA Jeremy and I are about to brew in the competition.