Last night was an entirely unexpected but quite welcome experience. Sort of on a whim, I asked my good friends Dan, Solomon, and Lindsey if they wanted to go to Dogfish Head with Julia and myself. I really just wanted to try out Zeno, a new brewpub exclusive currently on tap. I met Matt, the assistant manager at the brewpub, earlier this week and he was telling me that he brewed it. The beer is a Saison, one of my favorite styles, so I really wanted to see what they had come up with. The next thing I knew, my friends Paul and Chris were coming along as well.
When we arrived at the brewpub, it was busy as usual. To our surprise Luke from Epic Brewing in New Zealand was there as well waiting for a table. We met Luke briefly a little earlier in the week at a tour of the Dogfish brewery in Milton. He was there for an upcoming collaboration they're doing that involves tamarillo, a tomato-like tree fruit from New Zealand. We ended up talking about beer with Luke for a few hours during the course of the night. At one point he mentioned wanting to go to Iron Hill while he was still in Delaware, and I said that I thought the beers there are good, but much more traditional compared to Dogfish. This got me thinking a little bit about the role of the BJCP guidelines, and how they make us think about beer.
The BJCP (or Beer Judges Certification Program) is a group that educates individuals on tasting beer, for the purpose of becoming beer judges. Perhaps more importantly, they are also the group that defines the style guidelines for particular styles of beer, and these guidelines are widely used for both home and commercial brew competitions. For the most part what the BJCP does is great, and in my opinion, it definitely has great use for both the commercial and home brewer. However, there is also some flaws inherent in the system that I feel brewers on any level should note.
One of the most important uses for the BJCP guidelines is figuring out a basis for your beer. It gives you some idea of where you're going, and gives the person drinking it at least a vague idea of what to expect. This is great, because I can't tell you how many times I've been turned off by a beer at first simply because of a lack of education. See my blog post about Leipziger Gose for an example. I didn't get a chance to look up any information about the style until after I had already drunk the beer, and at that point I realized that I probably would have liked it a lot more if I had gone into the tasting with all the relevant knowledge. Because of these guidelines, anyone with a relatively basic education about beer can have a pretty good idea of what they're in for when you say "pale ale" or "stout". I don't think the importance of the basic expectations formed by the style guidelines can be overstated. Imagine if you went to a bar and ordered a pilsner, and were handed a black, roasty, bitter drink with caramel sweetness and a huge hop presence. Not that this beer couldn't be good, but it certainly wouldn't be what you expected. For better or worse, the very basics of the style guidelines become ingrained in the consumer as they learn about beer, and shapes their drinking experience.
The guidelines can also be a tool for honing your skills as a brewer. When you are learning to brew, learning the effects different ingredients have on flavor is extremely important, especially if you want to formulate your own recipes. Trying to create a historically and stylistically accurate beer can be a great challenge for a brewer, and one that will help refine their craft. It can give them an accurate understanding of how the beer style has developed, and teach them lessons that will be applicable to their future brews. The danger lies in when the specificity of the guidelines becomes paramount, and the only criteria the brewer attempts to meet.
Dan and I recently entered a BJCP competition, specifically the National Homebrewers Competition. This is the largest annual homebrewing competition with thousands of entries from across the country. A good chunk of the judges are BJCP certified, or at least have some BJCP training, and they use the BJCP style guidelines for judging the beers. The issue that arises is that many of the judges seem to treat the guidelines as hard and fast rules, an important distinction that anyone who has seen "The Pirates of the Caribbean" should be able to make. For instance, the style guidelines for an American Brown Ale state that it should be between 4.3% and 6.2% ABV, clear, with a low to moderate off-white to light tan head. So what happens when you make a beer that otherwise fits perfectly in the style and tastes delicious, but is 7% ABV, or has a head that's slightly too dark? You get docked points in the competition for being "out of style". The goal of these very specific descriptions are, on some level, to take out the issues arising from the subjectivity of taste. However the result is that the majority of beers that end up winning the competitions aren't necessarily the ones that taste the best, or the most creative, but the ones that adhere most strictly to the guidelines.
There are 2 important side effects here. First, brewers who have otherwise made a great beer can become discouraged by a lack of validation or their desire to win a competition. If that desire to win becomes great enough, they will likely change their recipe to the point where it is no longer the same beer, but fits into the guidelines more accurately. The second side effect is specific to commercial brewers. When a beer wins an award, it has an impact on the consumer's view of that beer. Let's say for example you have 2 bottles of pale ale sitting in front of you from 2 different brewers. One of them says that the beer won a gold medal in a nationally recognized competition, the other has not. Which are you more likely to buy if you otherwise don't know anything about the beers? Probably the one that won the gold medal. Even if you do try both of them, there's probably at least a small part of you expecting the award-winning beer to be better. The expectations imposed on you from an outside source in this way can impact how your palate is refined in the future.
If not held in check, this leads to the worst side effect that the BJCP guidelines can have, especially on consumers. Having enjoyed the craft-beer scene for a while now, we've run into plenty of people along the way who use the BJCP guidelines as their basis for deciding how good a beer is. In fact, they do this at times contrary to what their own taste buds tell them. All you have to do is go on Beer Advocate or Rate Beer and read through a few reviews of stylistically questionable beers to find some of these people. Here's a random review of Clipper City's Red Sky at Night I pulled off Beer Advocate to illustrate.
"I love heavy seas, Loose Cannon and Uber Pils, but they missed the shore with this one. 1. overly sweet 2. not complex 3. No earthy quality 4. not a dry finish. If this beer was called sweet sally ale I give it good marks. It drinks alright if you have a sweet tooth for the night. And considering this comes in a 6 pk. for $8.99 at 8% abv. it's still is a bargain. If your waiter ask you for desert grab one instead of that peice of cake."
Note the reviewer's qualifications, all taken from their BJCP-based expectations, followed by a statement that if they called it something else they would have liked it. As it was they gave the beer a C-. How about this review of Dogfish Head 60-minute IPA?
"(see my 90 minute review! lol) same thing here. not a very good example of the style. little to no hops taste smell or flavor. I dont understand why this beer is so popular. tastes more like an amber ale to me. sorry but this beer does nothing for me. I would think more hops could save this beer."
That reviewer gave the beer a D. Note that the reviewer didn't even mention whether they thought the beer tasted good or not, just that they thought it was more of an amber ale! The most important thing to note is that overall, these beers are well rated, with the Red Sky having a B (good), and the 60-minute having an A- (excellent). I didn't have to look very hard for examples either, these were the first 2 beers I searched for, and I just sorted by "lowest reviews first". I've known such "beer snobs" to look down on others for liking a beer they think isn't good solely based on stylistic guidelines, and citing the other taster's "lack of knowledge" as the problem.
There are also gaps in the stylistic guidelines, which makes it impossible to classify some beers. Take the black IPA, a type of beer that is gaining fans both on the commercial and homebrewing levels. There are no allowances for these dark and slightly roasty hop bombs. There has also been a trend towards "imperial" versions of beer styles. These have higher than average alcohol content and often greater hop presence than allowed by the guidelines. All such beers get relegated to the "specialty" category in competition (which is actually fine), but there is no such category in the minds of many consumers.
So what role should the BJCP guidelines play in our lives as brewers and consumers? The basis for our knowledge of a style, a starting point for recipe formulation, an exercise in brewing, and a grounding point for us to come back to when thinking about our beers. All these can be good things. What the guidelines should not be is a strict set of rules, the ultimate standard for deciding if a beer is good or not, a limit to creativity, or a point of contention among beer drinkers. At least I think so.
- Adam
