Oregon Beer Awards

The Oregon Beer Awards were handed out last night, and there were a few surprises. The first came when Wolf Tree (Seal Rock) won the first gold medal. Wait, who? That happened several times throughout the night, as obscure breweries took home medals: Freebridge (the Dalles), Back Pedal (Portland), Salem Ale Works, and Wild Ride (Redmond). Wolf Tree, incidentally, "is one of very few breweries operating on a working cattle ranch." I have no doubt about that.

Meanwhile, some high-profile breweries got mostly elbowed off the podium--pFriem, Block 15, and The Commons took home just four medals combined. That kind of thing happens when you have a blind-tasting competition. (Upright, a member of that often-lauded tier, pulled a hat trick, getting a bronze, silver, and gold, so some order was restored to the universe.)

The big winner, by a country mile, was Breakside, which took home ten medals total, including four gold. There were only 22 categories, which means Breakside managed to win a staggering 15% of the awards--in a competition with over 900 beers from 114 breweries. Tourists visiting the city often overlook Breakside or seem surprised when I suggest they go visit--this is a pretty good example of why locals keep buzzing about it. (Though from the perspective of optics, there is something slightly awkward about seeing the festival organizer, Breakside's Ben Edmunds, trot up on the stage so many times to pick up hardware.)

Maybe the best moment of the night was the short film put together by Lucas Chemotti and Ezra Johnson-Greenough to honor the late publican Don Younger, who was voted into the hall of fame:



Two years ago, when the OBA asked for nominations for the hall of fame, they forbade us from choosing posthumous candidates. Something like 75% of us ignored that and nominated Fred Eckhardt anyway (they relented and he was honored). Don is a worthy follow-up. Now maybe the organizers will get their wish and we can start honoring the living legends.

A couple other odd notes. Of all the beers submitted, 140 used Lactobacillus. 140! This is a trend no one could have seen developing even a decade ago. Related to that, Cascade Brewing, which is famous for using only Lactobacillus in its sour ales, won gold in the "Wood + Barrel-aged Sour + Brett category." Ron Gansberg is so opposed to Brettanomyces he used to dump barrels that had been wood-inoculated. I don't know if Framblanc 2015, the winner, had any Brett, but even winning the category is jarring.

Oh, and Ezra wore a tie.

Finally, a comment to organizers of the ceremony. Waiting outside in line for thirty minutes is not acceptable to get into a pre-ticketed event. The venue at Revolution Hall is great--for a crowd half that size. It's a rolling mosh pit with ten-minute beer lines. The ceremony is an awkward blend of awards-show pretension and in-group humor. I really felt for the poor MC, a comedienne whose jokes fell flat in a crowd where guys from a hop farm got a giant roar from the audience. The awards show itself doesn't know whether it wants to be for the industry or the public, and striking the unhappy medium between the two just isn't working. It's still a lot of fun, but that part needs to be tweaked.

Congrats to all the winners, the organizers, and the judges.

What Brewers Notice

8am--let's go judge some beer!

Judging for the Oregon Beer Awards unfolded over two long days this past weekend in an event space above the Widmer Brothers' pub. It is quickly becoming one of the more serious judging events I'm aware of: over 900 beers entered from 114 Oregon breweries, with organizers pushing and cajoling to make sure big and prestigious players contributed.  It's sponsored by Willamette Week, one of our alt-weeklies, but headed by Breakside brewer Ben Edmunds. What I particularly like about the event is the way the organizers have reconsidered beer categories. Beers were judged in just 22 categories--radically condensed when compared with the 96 the GABF use--159 (!) if you include sub-categories.

The other impressive aspect is the judges, the substantial majority of whom are brewers. Although Willamette Week wants to make this a revenue-generating awards event each year, the design of the competition is aimed squarely at brewers. Each beer receives notes from the judges for each flight it appears in (preliminaries, second, and medal rounds). The judging sessions are audio-recorded, and the recordings are made available to participating breweries. Feedback is not an afterthought--it's the central objective.

During judging, four people were grouped together for three flights in the am and pm on both Saturday and Sunday. This streamlined the process but also allowed the judges to develop a bit of rapport. I skipped the Sunday afternoon session so I could see that debacle of a Packer game, so I judged with three teams. Of the eight other members across all three groups (we had one no-show), seven were brewers. This may have been slightly skewed toward brewers, but indicates how heavily represented they were in the judging.

As an object of study, beer is large and contains multitudes. Homebrewers, writers, historians, beer geeks, chefs, regular drinkers--we all view it through a particular lens or filter. When you judge beer, that filter is laid bare--the things we notice reveal the way we experience beer. I love judging with brewers because they spend time with beer in a different way than the rest of us. They make it week after week, year after year, becoming incredibly sensitized to the specific chemical compounds present in their beer. Make a beer a hundred times and you really get to know it.

Because one of my own filters is to notice what other people are doing, I couldn't help but pay attention to the particular way they talked and thought about beer. Collectively, there were three habits of mind that were broadly shared and which seemed revealing. I'm going to pass them along because it's worth remembering that the people who make the beer may not think about it the way you do. Does that matter? Does it change anything? Perhaps, perhaps not, but knowing it may very slightly tint that lens you use to experience beer.

1. Process-focused
The flavor compounds present in beer come from a blend of ingredient and process. Beer drinkers tend to focus mostly on the ingredients: which malts, hops, yeast were used. Brewers, on the other hand, are incredibly sensitive to chemical compounds--acetaldehyde, diacetyl, DMS, isovaleric acid, autolysis, oxidation--that are clues to poor process or quality control.

The example that jumped out at me was oxidation. This is the constant, unconquerable foe of the brewer, one that will eventually destroy everything they do. From a sensory perspective, "oxidized" describes an objectionable quality of staleness that may either just dull the beer or taste like paper or wet cardboard. But to a brewer, it's a continuum; a beer at one month--well within the "fresh" zone of a beer's life--is more stale than a week-old beer. It's not stale, but it's observably less fresh. Because brewers are always in a battle to put their beer in front of consumers before that objectionable threshold arrives, they are highly attuned to this evolution.

I judged nine flights and probably close to a hundred beers. In that time there were two beers I would have flagged as dull and stale--not even papery yet, just a bit past their prime. But brewers flagged probably 25 beers for having some quality of oxidation. It happened so often that I started to ask them to describe it so I could locate what they were identifying. Eventually I started to. (It's worth noting that in most cases this was a diagnostic comment, not a critical one--see my second point below).

Brewer-judges plucked these chemical notes out forensically, looking for the fingerprints of brewers who'd made the beer. This of course makes perfect sense; it's what they themselves do in their own breweries. Most of those compounds occur naturally in the brewing process and can be eliminated through certain processes. If you make a beer with acetaldehyde or diacetyl, there's a remedy. Brewers are hawks for these flavors because it's their job to make sure they do or don't appear in the beers they make. Regular drinkers are aware of them at a gross level, but only as they impact the flavor composition of the beer. Brewers perceive them at far lower thresholds.

2. Objective over subjective
One of my favorite moments was when a brewer was describing a beer and said (paraphrasing), "The hops taste like dirt. I don't mean that as a criticism." We all laughed, but knew what he meant. There's an unvarnished way brewers use to discuss beer. If they can identify a chemical compound precisely, they use that over a general description. They would use isoamyl acetate rather than banana if that's the compound they tasted, DMS over corn. The reason is because "corn" is more general and may arise from some other source than DMS. (Corn, for example.) "Banana" probably refers to isoamyl acetate, but not always.

But they're also far less likely to use flowery language or language that carries the valence of judgment. A writer trying to communicate that "dirt" note to his reader my render it as "forest floor," which has a far more positive cast. It's also less precise. When you start breaking flavor down into its smallest parts, you encounter things that, were they the dominant note, would be objectionable. No one wants dirt beer. But when it comprises just 1% of the flavor, something like dirt can be a valuable, positive addition. And in this case, it was dirt--a flat, inorganic note that didn't have the complexity of "forest floor" or even "soil."

In the judging process, people--even brewers--will notice only some of all the available flavors, but collectively begin to construct a fairly complete description of the beer. If they were worried about censoring flavors that might be interpreted negatively or gussying them up so they seemed more palatable, that picture would be incomplete or inaccurate. This, again, is a big part of a brewer's life: they get to know their beers incredibly well, and understanding that there's a dirt note in them is far more valuable than pretending it doesn't exist.They know that it may improve a beer, too.

3. Quiet over loud
This last one is not so much a discovery as a confirmation. Brewers tend to gravitate toward subtle, well-composed beers and away from booming, shouty beers. I will not speculate too much about why this is--and nothing in the judging gave me an obvious answer. Perhaps brewers themselves will offer a reason (or a rejection of the thesis). Nevertheless it was true that in category after category, this slight preference revealed itself. I would guess that it's actually harder for the very aggressive beers in a category, no matter how well made, to win the top award than one that's more subdued and balanced.

This is, of course, precisely the opposite of the way beers are rewarded in the marketplace of mass judgment (BeerAdvocate, Untappd and the like). There, subtle beers have a very hard time breaking through. Within categories, it is the most vivid examples that rates highest. "Quieter" examples, no matter how expertly conceived and executed, just don't score as well. (All brewers know this, and sigh in resignation at the fact.)

This results in an interesting paradox: beer geeks often revere favorite brewers, but those brewers' preferences would likely not be the kinds of beers the geeks love. That paradox is one of the reasons I love this competition. Beer geeks may be surprised and even disappointed by some of the results--they were last year--but the fact that such an impressive group of judges participated should at least make them reconsider these beers.

It was a real pleasure to join these fine brewers in judging, and I look forward to seeing the results. If you're interested in attending the awards ceremony on February 28th, you can buy tickets here.

Oregon Beer Award Winners Tell Us A Lot

Last night the inaugural Portland Beer Awards were announced in what aspired to be an Oscars-like ceremony. Inaugural anythings are always a little tentative, and if this tradition survives it might one day be a hot ticket among even those who don't have beers in contention. But the ceremony is the least of matters--it turns out the winning beers were the real story. As the second award was announced, I realized something rare and unusual was unfolding.

The Oregon Beer Awards were a competition solely among Beaver State breweries, judged solely by Oregonians, and assessed blind, without the hype or peer pressure about which brewery currently has the most juice. The rare and unusual element was this: the winning beers are very good examples of the way locals appreciate beer. National and international competitions have a smoothing effect; with the Oregon Beer Awards, you get a concentrating effect as the feedback of culture works its mojo. Most of the judges were brewers who drink each others' beer, share tips and recipes with each other, and who have, over decades, co-authored the Oregon palate. It's the difference between having American beer geeks judge Belgian beers and having Belgians judge them. The winners weren't just Oregon beers, they were the Oregonianist of beers.

I have very poor photos of all the winners. This was the least poor.

So, back to the ceremony. The second award was in the wheat category, and some obvious suspects were getting announced: Occidental's stellar Hefeweizen for bronze, Fort George's dry, sophisticated Quick Wit for the silver. And the gold? Widmer Hefeweizen, the wheat beer we were all weaned on. You hear a lot of talk about how this brewery or that brewery has slipped or changed, but in the quiet of a blind judging, you just have the beer. There was a kind of delicious appropriateness that Widmer's old flagship, perhaps the most discussed beer in Oregon's craft beer history, would steam to victory. What else so well defines what we Oregonians think of as wheat beer?

When John Harris won the gold for Capella Porter at his new joint, Ecliptic, it was another echo from the past. I have no doubt he's enjoyed winning medals at national competitions, but there's something special about getting the nod from your friends and peers. John choked up just slightly and said, "So, I used to brew a beer called Black Butte Porter..." He let the sentence just hang there, knowing that most of us would realize that he had been the brewer who originally brewed that other, incredibly important Oregon beer (or at least adapted it). He created the palate among Oregonians for porter, and now he was back to collect a reward from people who had learned his lessons well.

As expected, the night also featured regular mention of some of the younger guys, too (Breakside, pFriem, The Commons, and Buoy had great nights). They, of course, are part of this ongoing lineage, plowing the collective wisdom and preferences back into their beers. I started drinking Oregon beer in 1987, and I've been drinking it ever since. I've never really known how to communicate to non-Oregonians what Oregon beer is--why Widmer Hefeweizen, The Commons Urban Farmhouse, and Breakside IPA are all indicative of it--but now I don't need to: they can just look at the winners of the OBA.

I'll post the winners below the jump, and do have a look at them all. The winning beers represent just 8% of all the beers selected--and often in these competitions, the difference between first and third amounts to the preferences of one or two judges. These are all really good, really Oregonian beers.

An Impressive Debut: The Oregon Beer Awards

Oregon Beer Awards
Revolution Hall (1300 SE Stark St, # 110)
Tuesday, Feb 23, 5:30pm
$15 tickets include beer and snacks | Full details


For decades, Americans have been trying to judge their beers. The Great American Beer Festival dates back, amazingly, to 1982. Homebrew competitions predate that by four years. As the decades have piled up, so have the competitions, and there are now so many of them they're like white noise playing in the background. So many breweries have won so many awards that nobody pays much attention to them anymore. Given the history, I wouldn't blame you if you tuned out the latest awards ceremony, which will happen at Portland's Revolution Hall in four days' time. But for once, you shouldn't. The Oregon Beer Awards are something truly new and different, and they may change the way we think about this whole judging business.

Source

A Philosophical Change
Why would you judge beers in the first place? To try to identify and laud the best ones, right? This seems intuitive enough, but the way these competitions have evolved has undermined this simple goal. When we think of "best," what pops into our minds are those beers that really rocked our worlds. We've all had the experience of trying a beer and thinking, "Holy crap, this thing is amazing." It's the experience that has given beer all this energy and excitement. But in trying to set up the formal structure for judging beers, competitions have created rigid style categories with very narrow criteria. Because beers vary so much, they've addressed this by adding ever more styles to the competitions. What you end up with are beers that "test" well in these rigid categories. Any beer that does not conform to the model has no place at competitions.

Recognizing this, the OBA founders have radically simplified everything. (Those founders, incidentally, are brewer Ben Edmunds, Willamette Week arts and culture editor Martin Cizmar, and blogger Ezra Johnson-Greenough.) There are only fourteen categories. (The GABF has 92.) This is the first year they've done this with judging, and my guess is that they'll be tweaked slightly in future years, but you can understand their basic logic when you see the list:

• Pils/helles/kolsch
• Wheat/wit/weizen
• Stout/porter
• "Classic styles" (browns, reds, ambers, etc.)
• Belgian beer
• Sessionable hoppy beers (6% and lower)
• IPA (6.1% to 7.4%)
• Strong hoppy beers (7.5% and higher)
• Dark hoppy beers
• Flavored beers
• Fruit and field beers
• Sour and wild beers
• Barrel-aged beers
• Experimental beers

The notion here is to trim the categories enough that you're not comparing beers of radically different type, but leave plenty of space for what in other competitions would be "nonconfroming beers." It is a decidedly American list, which is appropriate to the entries. You could have a category for English styles, but they are now so rare it just doesn't make sense. The organizers made their orientation about what they were looking for explicit:

"In general, it is not our goal to reward or eliminate beers on a technicality. In all categories, the ideal is a harmonious and delicious beer which exemplifies the category as it exists in today’s beer culture. Harmoniousness includes technical criteria such as color and carbonation as well as more qualitative elements like finesse, moreishness/drinkability, and balance."

They're really trying to find beers that spark that "holy crap!" moment.


Qualified Judges/Good Competition Design

The competition took place over two days. Seventy-eight breweries entered 525 beers across the 14 categories. On day one, judges tasted flights of all the beers (usually around ten per flight) and selected three to advance. The 64 judges were an impressive group of professionals. Most were brewers--a who's who from around the state--but there were also distributors, hop growers, pub owners, and writers. I was one of the lucky judges on day one, but had to miss the second day. On day two there were prelim rounds and finals rounds.


I've judged beer probably a dozen times, and this was different. We were allowed to consult any style guidelines, basically to give us a sense of what we were looking for. But then the process was far less technical and more subjective. We just talked about the beers we liked and why. There were generally some beers the table quickly eliminated because they weren't especially interesting examples or had notable flaws. In other competitions, there's usually a big discussion about style adherence. Is beer X a good example of a pale ale, or is it really more of an IPA? I judged both narrow categories like kolsch as well as quite broad categories like the session hoppy beers and wild ales. Those were fascinating.


In the session hoppy ales, there was a broad selection of styles: session IPAs and hoppy pales, of course, but also an English IPA, two hoppy lagers, and a hoppy saison. There were a couple of old-school, ragged-edges hoppy beers, too. Tasting them all was disorienting at first, but then illuminating. Although they were not similar stylistically, they were all using they elements of the style they chose to frame their use of hops. Of the 60+ beers I tried that day, my overall favorite was the hoppy saison, and I hope I learn what it was at some point.

______________

I have no idea if Willamette Week is going to want to continue this tradition, or if breweries will participate at the level they did this year. But whether the Oregon Beer Awards continue or not, this year's competition set a new standard for what these things can be. There will be only 14 gold medals announced on Tuesday, and for once I am really excited to know what they are. Winning a gold (or even a silver or bronze) should be the mark of very good beers.