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.

Why We Judge

There may be some very small economic impact yet associated with national and international beer judging contests.  When a brewery like Old Town Brewing picks up the gold in fresh hop beers, I don't doubt it boosts visits to the pub a bit.  But really, the benefits of a GABF or World Beer Cup have more in common with the Clios than Academy awards.  At this point, they are industry awards, observed and appreciated far more within the group than celebrated among the general public.

And why would they matter?  You know exactly how good you think Firestone Walker's Union Jack IPA is, and knowing that it is a perennial award-winner does not affect your opinion or preference relative to RPM or Arrogant Bastard or Total Domination.  You are well-versed in things beery and hoppy, and you make your choice based on personal tastes and a fairly deep well of knowledge.  Even casual beer fans know enough to recognize that personal preferences and awards are at the very best only loosely correlated.

But it wasn't always so.  Twenty years ago and more, Americans didn't know what beer was supposed to taste like.  They knew light lagers, but that familiarity gave them no clues about witbiers and bitters.  Competitions were a guidepost for drinkers.  Professionals who understood what the styles were supposed to taste like identified the winners from among the pack--a valuable service for consumers.  Judging is done blindly, so the only consideration is the beverage itself.  This strips away the advantages big companies with fat advertising hold in the marketplace and helps elevate quality and authenticity above marketing--a critical element in a developing art.

This was illustrated most profoundly in the famous "judgment of Paris," in 1976 when American winemaking took a quantum leap:

"Organized by wine merchant Steven Spurrier, an Englishman who was then only 34 and running a wine school in Paris, ...the idea was to assemble some of France's greatest experts at Paris' Intercontinental Hotel one afternoon and do a blind tasting of French and California red and white wines.  No one, least of all Spurrier, whose business depended on the goodwill of the French wine industry, expected the California wines to win. "I thought I had it rigged for the French wines to win," admits Spurrier."

[American wines took three of the four top spots in the white wine tasting, including the top spot.]  "Then came the crucial tasting of the reds, which in wine circles are far more important and prestigious than whites. This time, four Grand Cru Bordeaux squared off against six California Cabernets. Desperately hoping the French would win this round, Spurrier admits he informed the judges that a California white had won the first tasting, rather than wait until the end to announce the results as he should have. The alarmed judges did everything they could to segment what they thought were the California reds and make sure they didn't win.  Even so, a 1973 Cabernet from California's Stag's Leap Wine Cellars took the top spot." 

The result was a complete reconsideration of California wines--a process that made it easier for Oregon, Washington, and other American wines to shoulder their way into people's consciousness of "good wine."  The days of jug wine dominance was soon to end.

We're in a similar moment with a third fermented beverage--cider.  The market is and has been dominated by large producers who make the equivalent of jug wine.  It's sweet, fizzy, and largely tastes like liquid Jolly Rancher.  In the past year, as I have been talking to people about cider, I've found an almost uniform lack of knowledge--but growing interest.  It's like 1975 in the wine world, 1985 in the beer world.  People have a sense good cider exists, they just don't know how to recognize it.

Ten days ago, Nat West hosted the second Portland International Cider Cup, and invited me (possibly unwisely) to judge.  I was on the panel that judged dry English and barrel-aged ciders.  The Cider Cup may not be the judgment of Paris, but it certainly has a place in helping customers sort out which ciders are good.  It also helps them understand that, as in beer and wine, ciders come in different categories.  The winners are here, and you'll probably see some names you haven't heard of, and some you didn't expect to see winning awards.  (I was gobsmacked to learn that Rogue's Pink Gin Cider was the one we selected in the barrel-aging category--breweries don't often make great ciders.  This one was really nice, though, and is a great introductory cider.)  A cidery I'd never heard of, the Rogue Valley's Apple Bandit, took best in show.

Cider is emerging as the latest craft beverage.  For the next decade, judging competitions are going to help Americans understand it.

Listen to Your Beer

Karl Ockert wants to change the way we think about beer. Ultimately, he wants to change the way we talk about it, too, but first he wants us to abandon our old mental models. There's a pernicious habit among the beery folk to treat beer like a lab experiment and find the flaws. Beer judging is almost a perverse process of totting up a beer's flaws; as in golf, the least strokes--or black marks--wins. When we do approach beer from the perspective of appreciation, our language is often imprecise and overly broad: "malty," "hoppy" and so on.

Karl, now the technical director for the Master Brewers Association of America, is putting together a program that will teach people to be better appreciators. It's in the vein of the cicerone program, but focused more narrowly on the sensory experience of beer. The idea is to use all one's senses to explore beer, then use a consistent set of terms to describe them. To put a bit of mustard on the process, Karl asked us to think about listening to our beer. (Turned out the point had more to do with the way sounds trigger impressions, memory, and expectations--a nice way of illustrating how the brain, the sixth sense, intrudes on the process.) The sound of beer being poured into a glass and the visual presentation--that's where the process starts, and it goes through the final swallow.

More interesting for our purposes, Karl has completely reimagined the taxonomy of beer. Gone are the classic divisions of ales and lagers, of clusters of styles based on region. Instead, beers are grouped into four groups based on their dominant flavor:

• Malt-driven beers (Examples: Munich helles, brown ale, bock, barleywine, porter)
• Hop-driven beers (Examples: pilsner, pale ale, IPA)
• Fermentation-driven beers (Examples: lambics, Bavarian hefeweizen, abbey ales)
• Flavored beer (Examples: wit, rauchbier, fruit beers, bourbon barrel-aged)

I'm not actually sure these are the best ways to break down beers by category. Saint Angelo De Ieso brought a Westvleteren 12 to the conference (bless him!), and I was struck at how much it reminded me of a barleywine. There was very little fermentation character in it. Speaking of barleywines, some are malt-driven but some, like Ockert's own Old Knucklehead, are damned hoppy.

But that misses the point. Karl's goal is to make us think differently about beer. If we're focused on the dominant flavor, we're looking for the beer's character, its positive attributes. Conceptually, beginning at the place of the dominant flavor and then exploring from there makes perfect sense. Along the way, we might well find a dreaded off-flavor. But finding it doesn't dominate the process; it's just one of the many qualities we find in the beer. It orients the taster toward appreciation, not judgment. (Once you've located the beer's central character, the specifics follow in a more familiar way; the descriptors Karl suggests are standard adjectives that relate to specific elements in a beer, like "clove" or "citrus" or "toffee.")

Whether the Beer Steward Program's model becomes the standard or not, I very much hope the idea Karl's promoting gains currency. We need a new way of thinking about beer; one based on understanding and appreciation rather than judgment.

Odd Words From the Washington Post

I've been keeping one eye on the Washington Post's Beer Madness competition, which is now down to its final two. The idea was interesting: a bracket system like the NCAA basketball tourney, but with each quadrant representing a broad category of beer. Obviously, the outcome isn't worth debating (run the same beers past any ten panels and you'd get ten different winners), but the experiment is interesting.

What's weird is today's write-up by Greg Kitsock. It includes passages like this:

A wheat wine from DuClaw Brewing in Abingdon, Md. An Americanized version of a Belgian tripel from Flying Fish Brewing in Cherry Hill, N.J. A coffee stout from Evolution Craft Brewing in Delmar, Del. A double IPA from Lagunitas Brewing in Petaluma, Calif. None of those breweries existed 20 years ago; neither did any of those styles. [emphasis mine]

and this:

Bob Tupper, of Tuppers’ Hop Pocket Ale renown, summed up the dilemma: “How can you choose between this nice [double] IPA, well brewed, with well-blended flavors, or the big coffee jolt?” He picked the Lagunitas “because this beer is so much harder to brew than the coffee.”

One of the main reasons to hold a competition like this is beer education--especially for a newspaper. The final four certainly didn't represent novel styles--even by American breweries. And highlighting a quote saying a coffee stout is easier to brew than a double IPA is also a dubious claim.

Good luck to the competitors, but to the WaPo I say: work a bit on the education part.

Bracketology: the Beer Edition

The Washington Post is doing something interesting. To coincide with March Madness--college basketball's single-elimination tournament--the paper is conducting a similar competition of 64 beers. Nothing new there--and in fact, this is the fifth year they've done it. What is interesting is that the bracket quadrants have been broken into general types: malty, hoppy, fruit and spice, and roast.

So for the first four rounds, each beer will be competing against a slate of similar styles of beer. Only when the competition reaches a final four will the styles go head-to-head. These kinds of competitions are never satisfying in the sense of determining good beers--the variables are just too abundant (beer availability and freshness, regional preferences of judges, etc.), and the pool far too small to qualify as a genuine test of quality. (Gaze at the list and you'll see some fun little beers--Abita Turbodog, Full Sail Session Black--that no one would expect to do well in this kind of competition.) The best of them have the capacity to make us think more deeply about beer, though, and in this regard, the Post's competition is beguiling.

It seems to borrow from the dog show process. First beers compete within a general category, then they move to best of show. The final could pit an Irish ale, a Belgian strong, an imperial IPA, and a vanilla porter against each other. Which bee wins this competition won't be nearly as interesting as the very effort to judge such disparate beers against each other. It raises the question about what we mean when we say "best." And that is definitely a worthy inquiry.