Ever pull up the results of a beer competition and wonder, who the heck picked these winners? I bet you have and that’s why, when attending last Friday’s initial judging session for the San Diego International Beer Festival, I decided to give readers a behind-the-scenes look, because even though this competition garners entries from around the world, it is as #sdbeer as it gets.
What started in 2007 as a humble tasting event (by today’s standards) has evolved to San Diego’s largest annual beer festival and a staple of the San Diego County Fair. Particularly impressive is the volume of beers presented as entrants into the event’s competition element, which includes a whopping 57 categories, many of which are broken into various subcategories (e.g., German-style Weiss includes South German-style Hefeweizen, South German-style Dunkel Weizen, South German-style Kristal Weizen, South German-style Weizenbok, Berliner-style Weisse, Leipzig-style Gose and Contemporary Gose). This year’s competition broke records, with 1,470 beers in contention (plus ciders and meads). That’s a heck of a lot of beverages, requiring a heck of a lot of people who are willing to wile away one-to-two full days sipping, dissecting and stressing over each and every one of them.
I don’t mean to make it sound like misery. It’s not. But it is serious business that in no way resembles any of the fun types of imbibing experiences that are the foundation of peoples’ love of drinking beer. I see it as a different form of fun with beer, a gathering of people who really care about beer and the people who devote their lives to crafting it and an opportunity to recognize those who do an exceptional job while evolving one’s palate and knowledge base. The people who judge the SDIBF fit this bill. But who are they?
The 64 judges who showed up last Friday and 100 judges who took part on Saturday were made up of certified beer judges, Cicerones (the beer-industry equivalent of the wine world’s sommeliers), professional and recreational brewers, brewery owners and employees, brewing-industry suppliers, and bar and restaurant owners. They were all unpaid, and took time out of their workdays and weekends to make sure qualified judgment was passed on the fruits of thousands of brewers’ labor. Each year, more volunteers are required and each year industry personnel heed the call. So, too, do volunteer stewards who work behind the scenes doing even less glamorous work—organizing the beer, coordinating service in a blind setting that further complicates things, and spending a day shuttling ales and lagers to and from tables, re-pouring on request and making sure judging records are correctly conveyed.
At the start of the day, judges are led to a quiet (usually chilly) room where they are strategically broken up into pairs of experienced and less-experienced individuals to ensure the fairest form of evaluation and raise the skill level of everyone involved. Those duos are then assigned a style to judge, with coordinators making sure judges who work for breweries do not end up judging a category they have submitted beers for. Each duo is presented with roughly a dozen beers from the same category. (They may receive beers from different subcategories. For instance, in one round I judged four Berliner weiss, two Leipzig-style Goses and six contemporary Goses.) From there, each judge evaluates all of them on their own, filling out critique forms that will later be sent back to the submitting breweries. Once they have a feel for the aroma, flavor, aftertaste, structure, balance, drinkability and conditioning of each beer, the pairs confer with one another, debate the merits of each beer and determine two-to-three beers to move on to the next round. In the case of medal rounds, they instead determine first-through-third place. At no point are they informed of the identity of any of the beers they are tasting, and often not even after they have turned in their final assessment. The average person would be shocked to see the level of confidentiality employed at this competition, but it is both necessary and effective.
The debate phase is particularly interesting. Often, despite having two intelligent connoisseurs paired up, there will be disagreements. Much of judging does come down to interpretation of guidelines and what is “acceptable” or even “profound” about a beer. I have seen judges go back and forth for up to an hour during medal rounds. I, myself, though rather malleable in such situations, have even taken more than a half-hour to come to a conclusion. It all remains civil, but it can be frustrating all the same. But it’s all worth it, because at the end of the day, every judge is doing their best to ensure gold, silver and bronze medals are presented to beers truly deserving of those awards. People worked hard on those beers and these volunteers do their best to do right by all of them. The solace that they’ve done their best is really the only thing these judges are getting out of the process. Winners won’t even know who thought so highly or their product. But it’s enough and, speaking for myself, it’s quite an honor to be a part of this process.
With the work of weighing the inherent values of everything from cream ales to wood-aged stouts complete, the results are due to be announced on or before May 1. And better yet, many of those beers will be available along with hundreds more from across the globe at the San Diego International Beer Festival, which will take place at the San Diego County Fair June 15-17.