I have mixed feelings about beer competitions.
If I brew I beer that I think may be worth winning an award, it is safe to assume I enjoy the beer myself, and thusly am mailing away a portion of a limited batch that (given the nature of homebrewing) will never be precisely replicated again.
I don't take well to criticism in general, much less criticism I deem to be unconstructive or poorly thought out. So far all criticism I've read on judge sheets have been, in my opinion, both unconstructive and poorly thought out. I don't necessarily blame the judges however. Having judged a homebrew competition myself, I understand the time and space constraints of judging beer in large quantities. There is pressure to keep moving forward with the entries, and the spaces leave little room thoughtful criticism. So an individual beer crafted with love and attention, doesn't always get the full time and attention in judging the brewer would have liked. But that doesn't mean the judge didn't provide criticism with the best of intentions. The judges experience or time constraints may very well have been a limiting factor in providing the kind of feedback the brewer would find useful.
Furthermore, I find beer styles in general to be a crude tool. Its like making assumptions about a person based on character traits we assign to nationalities. Sometimes submitting a really creative beer in the category it is most like, would be like me, having held myself out as an American, evaluated based on how good of an American I really am. Imagine my dismay if I got my evaluation results back with a low score and a note that said "Nice guy but you would have scored higher if you submitted yourself in the Canadian category." That may have been a strained analogy, but it was intended to illustrate that what makes the American micro-brewery so special is that brewers, many having started as homebrewers, set out to bring something unique and creative to the marketplace. As supermarket shelves fill with a wider variety microbrew selections, new breweries must become increasingly creative to grab a consumers attention. You can no longer build a micro-brew dynasty on a well balanced, hoppy pale ale as Sierra Nevada did. And lets face it, as homebrewers we frequently pride ourselves on our creative brews.
So why then are we so eager to seek awards based on proscribed styles that reward textbook brewing? I don't have an answer to that question because I, almost spitefully, brew outside style guidelines.
With all this in mind it would seem incongruous for me to disclose that I am about to start studying for the BJCP exam. Yet that is exactly what I am about to do. A small (or maybe not so small) group of homebrewers in Utah have decided to use their numbers as interested test takers to draw an exam administrator into the Beehive state to give us Utah homebrewers a chance at beer judge certification without the hassle of long distance travel.
Perhaps my mindset as a skeptic will generate an interesting perspective as I work through the material in preparation for the exam. Perhaps my eyes will be opened to the beauty of the style guidelines. Perhaps there is plenty of room within the four corners of proscribed perfection. And maybe, just maybe, I'll come to realize that I shouldn't have been enjoying my off-style brews as much as I have been.
Only time will tell...
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Spring is in the Air
16 years ago
2 comments:
An interesting perspective Doug. You being a "law guy" I am surprised to learn that you would prefer chaos within the beer world. Without style guidelines how can one judge and decipher one beer from the next? To say that styles shouldn't exist, to me, doesn't compute. One needs guidelines to know what to order as well. Brewing is science and art; but even art is categorized and judged by style.
If I am not making sense, well then the better part of Halloween night is getting to me. We should discuss this further on the podcast perhaps. Cheers.
If I suggested that I preferred chaos in the beer world and that styles should not exist, I apologize, for that certainly was not my intent.
To the contrary,
Perhaps my philosophy on beer styles depends on what I envision as a "homebrewing life-cycle."
I believe styles (and their related guidelines) are excellent starting points. When I began homebrewing (the beginning of my homebrewing life-cycle) I had a good idea of the types (styles) of beers I enjoyed, and relied heavily on the style label (Porter, Pale Ale, Belgian Dubbel) when surfing recipe websites and reading brew magazines looking for recipes that would enable me to create a beer of my own that was similar/familiar compared to other commercial beers I had tried and came to recognize as a particular style of beer. So in that sense style guidelines were valuable to me when I needed to know what ingredients were involved in creating certain styles of beer.
Now before you tell me I've proved your point, I will clarify what I think is often forgotten. Just because that commercial beer that I enjoyed and used as inspiration for creating my own beer said it was a Dubbel (for example) on the label, does not mean it was a "good" example of the style under the BJCP guidelines, but it was none the less a very good beer.
Perhaps a discussion of my notion of the homebrewers life-cycle and the hypothesis that the BJCP guidelines should have an inverse relationship to that cycle is a topic for another conversation.
However, I would close by saying that as a homebrewer gains experience and self confidence that person should be able to judge a beer and distinguish it from other beers by personal taste. I don't need to know if a beer is stylistically a pale ale or an IPA to know if it is distinguishable from other beers. I just need to know if I enjoy it. Once a brewer has gotten their brewers feet underneath them (as I know you have) you don't need to consult a database to tell you what to order. Rather you can walk into our local homebrew shop and throw a few kernels in your mouth, give them a chew, and consider whether you might enjoy that in your beer.
Finally, I agree that brewing is both a science and an art. And it is true that aspiring artists are frequently judged on their ability to replicate a certain art style. However, I posit that art history is replete with examples of how truly great artists defied styles only to have themselves become recognized for creating a new art style altogether.
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