"Excellent beer, not quite to style." Sound familiar?
Anyone who's had the, ahem, pleasure of discussing beer judging with me will know that I'm not entirely convinced on this whole judging to style thing.
Judging to style clearly isn't a perfect system (none are), but I'm vexed by the lack of discussion about how and why this system has reached the status of orthodoxy in homebrew competitions.
So I want to try running a competition without style guidelines. Tastiest beer wins. Sounds simple, right?
Don't even think about clicking through if you don't have fifteen minutes to spare.
The BJCP's FAQ says: "In a competition setting, the Style Guidelines provide guidance to judges so that there is a level playing field for all entrants. Judges and entrants are both using the same descriptions, so the decision on "which beer is best?" is based less on personal whim of the judges and more on how well the entered beer matches world class commercial examples of the style."
As everyone reading this will know, whenever you get a bunch of homebrewers in front of a few beers you will have a widely (wildly?) varying range of opinions on the relative merits of each beer.
Judging to style is unquestionably less subjective than 'do I like this beer?', but it is a subjective process. Judge IPAs, discuss bitterness, and you'll see what I mean. It's more than just perception thresholds too, judges' knowledge bases and vocabularies to describe what they taste vary massively.
So it is, in my mind, an objective process being performed in a subjective manner. This is absolutely unavoidable with human judges. So I propose to recognise the limitations in the process and work with them. Not judging to style is openly subjective. How's that for simple?
And whilst I'm on the topic, beer appreciation should be a subjective process. We should embrace subjectivity, that is what the experience of drinking beer is about. Reducing a beer to 'does it fit the style?' takes all the enjoyment out of it. Freed from this constraint judges can enjoy the beer or not, as the case may be.
Under the current system judges end up hiding behind style guidelines rather than giving an honest appraisal of a beer. For a beer that you want to score a 35 it's a lot easier to say "bitterness a touch low for style" (or similar) than "this is a good beer and the score reflects that, but the flavours aren't quite as fresh or vivid as some of the other beers in the class". Length aside, it's clear to me which is more valuable feedback, even if it's nowhere near as easy to remedy.
Right, so if you still think I'm nuts I'll give a few examples to suggest why I think could work.
- First, and most important, 99.99% of beer drinkers never consider style when drinking. Yet you can ask anyone whether a beer is good or not and they'll be able to tell you. This process happens constantly, with nearly everything you consume. Formalising the process shouldn't be too much of a leap.
- Ratebeer and BeerAdvocate both effectively operate on this premise already. Sure, BA suggests you "keep style in mind" but if that were actually the case Bud Light wouldn't have an average rating of 1.91.
- The Australian International Beer Awards actually have adherence to style as one of the scoring components. For example, aroma is worth x points, flavour y and adherence to style z. From memory it's three points out of 20.
- And there's a competition which already runs in this manner. (So yeah, I'm basically just ripping off someone else's idea.) There's an interesting discussion of it about halfway down here.
Categories: I hope that by now you'll have figured out entries wouldn't be categorised by style! But I think some sub-division is required to make it easier for judges and offer more potential prizes for entrants. So you could have groups like "hoppy", "strong", "session", "out there" etc.
Beer descriptions: The way I see it a brewer should be able to describe their beer in whatever terms they like, which is exactly what happens in the commercial world. So you could call your beer "pale ale", "American pale ale", "Alice Springs pale ale" or "intergalactic Belgian dodecahedron pale ale" for all I care. The judges would be given this information.
Scoring: Points would be awarded for fairly standard criteria. Aroma, appearance, flavour, mouthfeel, overall - something along those lines. But purely on an enjoyment scale, not against style guidelines. One further potential criterion could be 'spirit of the category'. A mild could theoretically score perfect marks for all the other criteria entered in the 'hoppy' or 'strong' categories, but would obviously score poorly in 'spirit'. I'm disinclined to attempt something like this though, I think I'd rather just move a beer described as a mild (or tasting like one) into the appropriate category.
And it's as simple as that! Actually I must be forgetting some things, but in my mind it's simple.
I can foresee some potential problems. Such as:
- The need for quality judges. When a competition employs BJCP methodology they avoid some of the liability in terms of judging quality - because the judges should know what to do having sat the BJCP exam. If you go your own way and the judges' feedback sucks then you only have yourself to blame.
- Making sure judges clearly understand how the scoring works. This would be a fairly new concept to quite a few judges, so making them 100% clear on the process is obviously critical.
- Confusion for entrants. Same as above - a new concept can easily lead to misunderstanding. A clear explanation of the process would be critical.
I'm sure there are plenty more potential problems but I'm too biased an observer to see them.
So what do you think? Who wants to help me run this thing?
