Five judges, five experienced palates, a flight of eight commercially available beers. Stewards deliver the first three beers to the table in good order, and we get to work assessing and evaluating. Then arrives beer number four, and my nose immediately twitches.
I glance to my left and right, and my questioning gaze is met by one, then two, and finally all four of my fellow judges. We don’t speak of it, as we are not meant to discuss the beers until the flight has been fully assessed. Yet we are all acutely aware of the sickly aroma of butterscotch that has filled the air.
The reason: Diacetyl, and lots of it. The guilty party: Beer number four.
This scenario will no doubt be familiar to anyone who’s done more than a modicum of professional judging. A brewery spends good money to enter a competition, then spends more to ship the beer—the upcoming World Beer Cup, for example, costs $180 per brand to enter, with many categories needing up to 12 bottles or cans of beer for judging—but because the beer is notably flawed in some way, it all winds up being a complete waste. As a judge, all you can do is note the problem on your scoresheet and shake your head in bewilderment.
Today, with a couple of decades of judging experience under my belt, including some years organizing the Canadian division of the World Beer Awards and the new Canada Beer Cup, I can say with certainty that this sort of situation happens much less often than it used to—which is not the same as saying it no longer happens.
To protect your investment and increase your chances of winning, here is our best advice for entering major competitions—straight from the people who organize them. While some of it may seem self-evident, we take nothing for granted.
Five judges, five experienced palates, a flight of eight commercially available beers. Stewards deliver the first three beers to the table in good order, and we get to work assessing and evaluating. Then arrives beer number four, and my nose immediately twitches.
I glance to my left and right, and my questioning gaze is met by one, then two, and finally all four of my fellow judges. We don’t speak of it, as we are not meant to discuss the beers until the flight has been fully assessed. Yet we are all acutely aware of the sickly aroma of butterscotch that has filled the air.
The reason: Diacetyl, and lots of it. The guilty party: Beer number four.
This scenario will no doubt be familiar to anyone who’s done more than a modicum of professional judging. A brewery spends good money to enter a competition, then spends more to ship the beer—the upcoming World Beer Cup, for example, costs $180 per brand to enter, with many categories needing up to 12 bottles or cans of beer for judging—but because the beer is notably flawed in some way, it all winds up being a complete waste. As a judge, all you can do is note the problem on your scoresheet and shake your head in bewilderment.
Today, with a couple of decades of judging experience under my belt, including some years organizing the Canadian division of the World Beer Awards and the new Canada Beer Cup, I can say with certainty that this sort of situation happens much less often than it used to—which is not the same as saying it no longer happens.
To protect your investment and increase your chances of winning, here is our best advice for entering major competitions—straight from the people who organize them. While some of it may seem self-evident, we take nothing for granted.
[PAYWALL]
Send Your Best, with Care
“Sending fresh beer and protecting it well—wrapping clear or green bottles against exposure to light, for instance—are two of the most important things a brewery can do to maximize their medal-winning potential,” says Luc De Raedemaeker, director of the Brussels Beer Challenge.
He also recommends that brewers take care to select samples from the best batch of any given beer. Some breweries even organize their brewing schedules such that the beers they want to enter are fresh and in peak condition when it’s time to ship.
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Doug Merlo, technical manager of the decade-old Concurso Brasileiro de Cervejas, says that breweries can always consider outside advice and training—especially if they don’t have their own experienced in-house judges, Cicerones, or QA/QC specialists.
“The brewery can hire a professional taster to consult on tasting the beers, reading the competition style guides, [and] putting the samples in the correct category, and at the same time train the brewery staff,” Merlo says. “In this way, the brewery can understand how to enter its beers in not just a single year’s competition, but for future competitions, as well.”
Know the Categories and Where Your Beer Fits Best
Let’s assume you’ve got great beer, and you’re prepared to send your best. The next critical thing to do—ask any judge with experience or any brewer with a history of winning—is to choose the right category for your beer and to register it correctly.
“The most common mistake brewers might make is not entering their beer in the appropriate style category based on the competition guidelines,” says Chris Williams, competition director for the Brewers Association, which organizes both the World Beer Cup and the Great American Beer Festival.
“This is a difficult needle to thread,” Williams says, “as many craft brewers may blur the style lines with beers they make. … While admittedly there’s not a home for every beer out there within the framework of the style guidelines, nine times out of ten, there is. It may just not be the first one that immediately comes to mind.”
De Raedemaeker’s best estimate is that about 5 percent of entries to the Brussels Beer Challenge are miscategorized. Not every competition will do this, but if he catches an obvious mistake before judging—“such as a dubbel in the blond abbey-style ale category,” he says—he will correct it. If the mistake is less obvious, he might contact the brewery to ask.
If obviously miscategorized beers make it to the judging table, the host organization may still attempt to correct it. In the Canadian preliminaries for the World Beer Awards, for example, we allow judges a decent amount of leeway in identifying incorrectly entered beers. If we find their concerns have merit, we’ll switch them from one style section to another—provided the destination category has not already been judged. Yet this is unusual as well as impractical for larger competitions. At the Canada Beer Cup, for example, I can only instruct the judges to assess the beer within the constraints of the category and to note in their comments where they thought the beer should have been placed.
In Brazil, Merlo goes further: “For reasons of transparency and compliance, we can’t technically interfere with the brewery’s samples registration,” he says. “What we are doing is educating the breweries through short instructional videos on various topics, including how to correctly enter beers in our competition. We hope to drastically reduce the number of breweries that make mistakes at the time of registration.”
The bottom line: Other brewers will be familiar with the guidelines and have an idea of where their beers fit best; if you’re not and you don’t, your beers will be at a disadvantage.
GABF judging. Photos: ©Brewers Association 2022
Play the Odds
Besides sending your best and choosing the right category for a given beer, it can pay to be strategic about which categories your brewery enters.
Most craft breweries these days produce a wide variety of styles—yet you can’t afford to enter them all, and most competitions limit how many you can enter anyway. When it’s time to choose, simple math suggests that certain styles offer greater medal-winning potential than others.
In the 2022 World Beer Cup, for instance, the Juicy or Hazy India Pale Ale category attracted a phenomenal 343 entries—the most of any style judged. The category Old Ale or Strong Ale, on the other hand, had slightly fewer than one-tenth that number of entries. That translates directly to a much better chance of walking away with a medal.
Note that strategic entering is much different from the disreputable practice of “category poaching,” in which a brewery makes a single batch of beer of a type they don’t normally produce, specifically to enter a low-entry category. No competition condones such activity, and some are actively working to root it out.
Don’t Let Your Paperwork Fail Your Beer
Once you’ve selected your categories, it’s also vital to fill out the entry form in its entirety.
“The most common mistake is forgetting to fill in additional details or filling in the wrong text box where some categories need additional information,” says Merlo in Brazil. “This is why we now make it mandatory to fill in the information text box in categories that need it, [so that] registration cannot be completed without filling it in correctly.”
Likewise, Williams at the BA includes “providing the info requested for judging for a given style” among the top three things a brewery can do to maximize its chances of winning (alongside “correctly categorizing a beer” and “packaging and shipping beers in conditions that don’t negatively impact what ultimately ends up in front of the judges”).
Do It for the Feedback
Of course, medals are only part of the reason to enter competitions. Most brewers also rank the comments they receive from judges as a major incentive—thus, it makes sense to choose your competition with a critical eye.
“Medal factory” competitions—those that award numerous medals at every level for each category—are less likely to provide useful feedback. So are competitions that fill their ranks with largely inexperienced judges.
As such, it’s advisable to keep an eye on who judges in a given competition year to year and to scrutinize those contests that don’t include information about judges on their websites. Generally, contests that are proud of their judges, or of their process for selecting judges, won’t be shy about disclosing those details.
A final point: According to my fellow competition organizers, and as I saw firsthand in last autumn’s Canada Beer Cup, the overall excellence of entries has, worldwide, improved dramatically over the past several years—“by leaps and bounds in terms of quality and ingenuity,” as Williams says.
That makes it more important than ever to put your brewery’s best beer forward when assembling your entries.
