Who Am I to Judge?
One thing I’ve never done before is judge a competition. I’ve never judged figure skating, dog show, my peers, pie baking contests, nothing. I clearly have no experience as a judge. Which is why this weekend will be a new experience for me. I’ve been tapped to judge the local homebrewer’s club’s “Iron Brewer” competition. To be honest, I’m not sure of what to do.
First, I’ll provide an introduction to the competition. Iron Brewer is similar to the televised chef show “Iron Chef.” While you can’t brew and taste with a mystery ingredient all in one day, you can use the idea of a mystery ingredient. Eight teams of brewers were assembled from the Sonoma Beerocrats, each team was given base grains, hops and yeast. Then the mystery ingredients were unveiled: raisins, 3 strains of Belgian yeast and a half pound of cascade hops. The rules: one or all of the mystery ingredients must be detectable in the finished beer.
The next question is how do I prepare for the event as a judge. Obviously, I need to know how these ingredients appear in the beer. Raisins are easy. The cascade hops are fairly straight forward as well. Where I see difficulty is with the yeast.
The three strains of yeast available for the competitors were Wyeast 1762 Belgian AbbeyII, Wyeast 3787 Trappist and White Labs WLP500 Trappist. These correspond to the commercially available beers you may have heard of: Rochefort, Westmalle and Chimay.
In order to full understand the flavor profile of these yeasts, I feel it’s best to try the commercially brewed beers from which the yeast is taken. This will be an arduous task, but such is the responsibility when one becomes a judge.
While it would be easy to simply enjoy the beers and use them as a basis of my judging, there are two flaws in that strategy. First, these are rather high standards to hold a homebrewers to and second, just because you use the yeast, doesn’t mean the beer will be a clone. I need to understand the essence of the yeast and separate that from the overall flavor of the beer.
This is the reason I chose what I consider to be an equal representation of each brewer’s dubbel. Ideally, I would be tasting the flavor of the yeast against a common base of malt, hops, and water.
Hopefully, I will be prepared for my task come Sunday. If anyone has any suggestions for my judging, please share them below. Also, please share your judging experiences if you have any.
Mario Rubio is NOT a BJCP Judge. Mario also has not homebrewed a batch of beer in more than 2 years. Mario’s qualifications as a judge include access to the internet where he was able to start a blog and a handful of people who bought into the fancy graphics and believed he knew what he was talking about. Any references to “celebrity”, “expert” or “handsome” are completely false and undeserved.
One Comment to “Who Am I to Judge?”
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First, tasting those beers won’t necessarily give you a sense of that yeast’s character. Yeast responds to everything from fermentation temperature to fermenter geometry. Several of the Trappist breweries use the Westmalle yeast. They all taste very very different.
But I still encourage you to taste them all and some others in the name of conducting good research.
Have fun.