I went to visit some friends on the coast this weekend and help them do the pre-judging for the a homebrew competition for their club. I've done plenty of judging in the past, but I've never been able to study for or take the BJCP test to become a certified judge. I have done enough judging for homebrew and commercial beer competitions in the past that they called me up last week and asked if I'd help out, however.
On the surface this sounds like it's all fun and games. Spend the afternoon drinking beer, eat about 2 lbs. of Georgia-caught white shrimp and a side of squash and onions while watching Usain Bolt make the seven other fastest men in the world look slow on the way to breaking a world record while never looking like he hit top gear. We topped that off with cheesecake and watching the US 4x100 medley relay help Michael Phelps become the goldest Olympian ever in a single games.
Sounds like a great night, and actually, for the most part, it was. My friends in Brunswick are a great couple and it was really fun watching athletic history form a dense cloud of records. The food was awesome. The only problem is so much of the beer was wretched.
I actually don't understand this. It costs $6 per beer to enter the contest, and while that isn't really all that steep, you'd think it'd prevent people from entering beer they knew sucked. I could understand the occasional bottle that had a bad seal and went flat and oxidized or got an infection that the brewer didn't catch because the rest of the batch was fine, but we had to go through so many beers that were oxidized, infected, so full of diacetyl that they smelled like a glass full of fake popcorn butter, and otherwise screwed up, that it couldn't just be the random bottle out of an otherwise good batch.
I'm a brewer and I've entered several of my beers into competition in the past, but I'd never have entered beers like this into a competition. I'm not sending a beer in unless I think it really has a shot to medal. I'm not sure many homebrewers realize this, but the job of judging homebrew can be dreadfully boring if the beer is bad. It's not like we're sitting around chugging brews and occasionally taking some notes. We have to seriously think about what we're perceiving, see how well it aligns with style guidelines and figure out the numeric scores it deserves. When the beer is good, the work is easy and enjoyable. When the beer is bad, it becomes a chore. Entering beer you know is bad shouldn't even be considered.
Maybe the reason I'm so shocked by this is that most of my homebrewing friends are also serious beer geeks. They've tasted enough beer and enough varieties of beer that they know what is right and what's messed up. Many of my homebrewer friends make beer I would be happy to pay for, but over half of the samples we tried yesterday and today were flawed enough that it's obvious that if that brewer had tasted his creations before sending them in that the brewer has no idea what he or she is doing. Some of them I wonder how much the brewer smokes because they obviously have very poor taste and smell receptors.
This may make homebrewers as a whole sound like a bunch of bumbling incompetents, but the truth is that there are tons of really great amateur brewers out there. I've judged at a couple of Ratebeer homebrew challenges where the problem was deciding which one of a group of truly excellent beers needed to get first and which had to settle for lower spots. There were even a few beers today that were pretty awesome. I personally judged a witbier, a cream ale, and a kolsch that were pretty good. There were also a chocolate stout and coffee stout that verged on incredible, but I'm still baffled at the number of bad beers I had to sip through to get the faults identified before I could dump the sample. Of course I guess it's like going to a festival of amateur artists or musicians. Some of them are dreadful without realizing it because they're too close to their work
And enough with the beer geek stuff. Most of you have no reason to care about any of this.
3 comments:
You have obviously never watched American Idol. If you had, you would know that the vast majority of the population are delusional.
You're right. I don't really care about the beer drinking stuff ...
Good point, Julie. People really are delusional. It's unbelievable the people who seem to genuinely believe they were born to do some certain thing --- some even claim God has called them to it --- and yet they are truly horrible at it.
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