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.

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...

First Competition

Square Kegs (my local homebrew club) is running a startup competition later this month. I've never entered beer in one before, but was definitely inspired to do so by listening to Jamil Zainisheff talk about getting better by doing so on many episodes of brew strong. I also happen to think that some of the recent batches I've done with Jeremy are the best I've ever made, and absolutely would stand up against other homebrew.

So yesterday I stopped by BrewCamp to drop off six entries in total:

1. West Texas Crude (Russian Imperial Stout, collaboration)
2. Light Sweet Crude (Russian Imperial Stout, collaboration)
3. Citra IPA (American IPA, collaboration)
4. Beer Wench Lager (Oktoberfest, collaboration)
5. Yet Another Imperial IPA (Imperial IPA, collaboration, extract experiment)
6. Mexican Hot Chocolate Stout (Spice Beer, solo venture, extract experiment)

I'm pretty stoked to get some BJCP-certified feedback on all of the beers and potentially win a couple of categories!

Props to the competition's organizers - they had over 500 entries yesterday. I'm looking forward to the actual event.

I'll post the score sheets once I get them back.

My Local Homebrew Shop

As far as I know, there are three homebrew shops in the city of Chicago proper. (One of them has a handful of locations, so technically there are six or seven actual "storefronts".)

However, there's one which very recently opened up and definitely stands out from the rest. Brew Camp (in the Lincoln Square neighborhood, which happens to be really close to my neighborhood) does some things differently from the other options and does them well.

They engage with their customers on both Facebook and Twitter and actually respond to questions and comments that people post. I'm still not entirely sold on the overall impact social media has on a business, but the guys here are definitely using it to their benefit.

They teach brewing classes for beginners at their space. This has to be one of the best ways to get people over the initial learning curve and into the hobby.

They are working with my local homebrew club to put on a competition this January and hosted the last meeting in their space.

In short, they're engaging with the brewing community here in Chicago in ways other than simply letting people come in to their store and ask for advice. In a small niche business like this one, it absolutely sets them apart from their competition. I'd much rather shop somewhere that I know my dollars are going to support people who are ambassadors for the brewing community and truly passionate about beer.

(I don't have any connection to Brewcamp, nor do I have any commercial interest in writing this post. I'm simply someone who's been really impressed with them thus far and thought they deserved another positive mention.)

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.