Beer judging

Beer judging, a swirl of the beer in the glass, a discreet sniff, a sip, a spoonful perhaps, a swallow, then carefully writing down the evaluation, discussing the beers, a brief eruption of laughter, a flurry of conversation, then back to contemplation, while the stewards bright and cheerful flit about and it’s ‘good morning table 8’. A judge puts the glasses of beer in a semblance of order, slightly higgledy-piggledy, another has them in a regimented line, while the brewer next to him has his gathered together, huddled together as if they discussing an urgent secret. Yet another has his glasses in an arc around his notebook. This room in which they judge in the National Brewery Centre is a place that resonates with the past of brewing and beer and pubs — retired wooden inn signs hang from the ceiling like regimental flags in a chapel, The Merry Minstrel, the Railway. A measure of past glories, names consigned to history, memories of a simpler time perhaps?

In this space where the judging takes place at the International Brewing Awards and mindful of the sense of silence the chief of judges sits on a chair, alone, silent, watching, observing like a father prior keeping an eye on his younger charges. And then the murmurs seem to have stopped and I am aware of a silence, a sudden silence as the judges laser-beam their concentration on the job in hand. The silence passes and small bush-fires of conversation flare up, ‘this is the one I have a problem with’, ‘it could be a conditioning issue’, ‘it was in the middle that I thought that there was some slight diacetyl’, ‘this is my favourite’, ‘overripe fruits’. And now the chief of judges is off his chair, patrolling the tables, words here and there, the watchful father and as the morning goes on the conversation ebbs and flow and I’m put in mind of some lines from Arnold’s Dover Beach: ‘Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,/ Listen! you hear the grating roar/ Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,/ At their return, up the high strand,/ Begin, and cease, and then again begin.’

Today though the time for contemplation and evaluation is gone and the medals are due to be announced and the mood will change to one of jubilation and commiseration and meanwhile most of the judges have flow, returned to Portland, Cornwall, Patagonia, Bavaria, while the beers they judged, the ones that win, will gleam and preen themselves for this is the moment of their glory. Brewing champions indeed.

Brewing Champions, my history of the International Brewing Awards will be published in the next few weeks. 

The International Brewing Awards

Beer judges back in the 1920s, they’ve changed a bit since

Like cardinals in a conclave, coming together to elect a new pope, the brewers gather, pens poised, whispers rising to the rafters with the assurance of curls of smoke, their concentration all too evident as another sip of beer is taken and tasted and adjudged as to whether it might be classed a champion. It’s the International Brewing Awards once more, here in bleak but beloved Burton, a competition that stretches back three centuries, all the way to 1888 when the 10th Annual Brewers, Maltsters, Distillers, Mineral Water Manufacturers, Licensed Victuallers, Caterers and Allied Trades National Exhibition and Market (snappy title indeed) was the venue for what an unknown scribe in the Brewers’ Journal wrote: ‘A very happy idea was that of Messers Gillman Spencer Limited, who had a competitive exhibition of beers brewed with their patent rice and torrified barley malts. Over 100 brewers responded to the invitation with the prospects of substantial prizes apparently having proved an incentive not to be neglected. The awards gave general satisfaction and were fully appreciated by the fortunate winners.’ 

And now as it ever was, the brewers remain in the judging chair (though beer writers have occasionally dipped in and helped out including Michael Jackson, Roger Protz and Mark Dorber), men and women from all over the world, including Portland, Patagonia, Bavaria and Cornwall; and in a room at the National Brewing Centre they sit, their faces a collective mask of concentration, noting this, noting that, the eternal patience of the beer judge, carrying on a tradition and securing and anchoring a competition that began when Victoria was on the throne. For three days these week, the brewing world is in Burton and the town is all the better for it.

I’m here keeping an eye on things, a guest of the competition’s organisers, but there’s another aspect to my visit — I have written a history of this competition, Brewing Champions, which should be out in the next few weeks, I’m rather pleased with it. And when the judges go home, the hundreds of beers in bottles, cans, casks and kegs will be thrown open and shown to the public at the International Festival of Beer, which starts on Friday. Roger Protz and I are there talking and tasting on Saturday, followed by Stephen Beaumont. It should be great fun, do come.

The beer of the future

It’s the eighth Brewers, Maltsters, Distillers, Mineral Water Manufacturers, Licensed Victuallers, Caterers and Allied Trades National Exhibition and Market held at Agricultural Hall, Islington, in the autumn of 1886. As well as the usual stalls with brewery bits and bobs (along with the promise of a beer or two), there’s also a museum of bottles and the curiosities of bottle manufacture organised by a Mr F Foster. According to the Brewers’ Guardian of the time, only a few visit it, perhaps because, as the magazine suggests, the cost of 6d is a bit of a deterrence (visitors have already had to pay to enter the Exhibition). However, far more interesting is the report on a fringe event, the Brewers’ Congress, where a paper called The Beer of the Future is read. At the end of the talk, an agent for a particular beer insists in loud tones that ‘lager is the beer of the future’. Did he then vanish in a police box that no one saw or was he drunk or was he prescient in the way he foresaw the future of British beer? We shall never know. 

How the International Brewing Awards makes me think

Fuller’s John Keeling at the judges’ dinner on the last night 

How important is a beer competition? What sort of judges should be in charge of the evaluations being done? Does it matter, does it sell any more beer, make drinkers more aware of a beer, or is it all a big old pat on the back, self-indulgence, well done chaps, have another. Thoughts like this flit through my mind whenever I judge beer or, as was the case with the InternationalBrewing Awards at Burton last week, observe. Brewers, naturally, are cock-a-hop when their beers are recognised as quality, some on the other hand pick and choose their competitions while others don’t enter them at all (their reason — selling to the beer drinker is competition enough). These competitions have their moments of amusement —the best of which is whenever the winner at the GBBF is announced you can bet that there will be two trains of conversation amongst those in the business: a) oh no not another mild, it’s political isn’t it?; b) the winner is too small to cope with the demand that the award brings and that there should be small and big brewer categories.

At the International Brewing Competition this past week, where I and Pete Brown had been invited to observe the goings-on, questions like the ones above quickly surfaced but were just as swiftly knocked into the ground as I watched a group of judges (who included Stefano Cossi, Geoff Larson, Doug Odell, Ian Bearpark, Vaclav Berka and Hans-Peter Drexler, amongst others) deliberating over the hundreds of beers that had been sent in. These guys are serious, and all the judges I spoke with articulated the dedication and expertise they bring to their role; all of them also communicated with a commendable sense of grace (no big cheese Charlies here).

And if you asked me to try and bring to life what I saw, then think on this: in the room where the judges sat at tables and the stewards whirled in and out with the beer, I could sense at once a hush, then over there a murmur and a flurry of words and then a return to silence, concentration, furrowed brows. To my left laughter gushed briefly, followed by intense discussion; more contemplation and intriguingly I noted the blank stare that masked a judge’s thoughts as a glass was lifted and inspected. In across the room as the glasses were hoisted I caught the glare of amber and copper, the glint of gold. ‘I thought it slightly thin, the body was thin’ drifts across from one table then that’s the beer out of the running. It seems cruel, but that’s life. According to the competition’s chief judge the affable Bill Taylor from Lion, ‘the guys switch from having fun to serious within seconds, it’s fascinating to watch’.

All this makes me feel as if the judging season has started: SIBA’s National is next month, while I’m off to judge at the Birra Dell’Anno in Rimini in a couple of days. Then there’s the IBC, the WBA (disclaimer: I’m paid to define categories, recruit judges and lead a table), more SIBA and CAMRA stuff and numerous competitions for the best beer of the festival in pubs throughout the country.

This is the joy of beer, it’s both fun, initiating all manner of discourse in the pub, bringing people together and helping them remember significant events (I was drinking Landlord on the night the Berlin Wall fell down and 6X on my wedding night), but it’s also a serious thing. It can present two faces, Janus like to the world, which is what I love about it. And on that note here are the medal announcements of the International Brewing Awards here — there are some great beers there and if I was in any doubt of the cachet winners attach to these awards then the brief email that I had over the weekend from Sharp’s Stuart Howe is worth a thousand words: under the heading ‘2 golds a silver and a bronze!’ he had written ‘Boooooom!’. So how important is a beer competition?