Tim Newman – Hoppiness.co.nz
Everyone knows a great beer when they drink one, but what makes it official? The process of assessing, codifying and minutely scoring the beers that find their way onto shelves is a lot more exhaustive than you might think.
While the year-round nebula of small regional competitions tend to focus on one style of beer and a small stable of breweries, much like the recent NZ Stout and Smiths NZIPA challenges, the New Zealand beer industry is only judged en masse three times annually. Firstly at the massive Australian International Beer Awards early in the year, then the New World Beer & Cider Awards, and finally the Brewers Guild Awards.
The New World competition could be considered something of the dark horse amongst the three, as it only considers beers that are available through said supermarkets, and as such is a little more consumer focused rather than the more ‘by brewers for brewers’ attitude of the other competitions. But, it also happens to be the one I judge at, so that’s the experience I can convey. However, while these competitions may differ structurally, the core process of judging a beer remains almost identical across the board.
Christchurch City typically hosts the venue where judging takes place, with the function spaces attached to our two race courses possessing the space and centrality that makes the massive logistical task easier. Day one sees the operations team get things assembled, and the year’s junior judges are onboarded into the judging process. For everyone else it’s a day of travel as the rest of the judging pool fly in from the various corners of the craft beer community.
That evening provides one last bit of calm before the storm of the next two days as the entire team sets in for a sensible (usually) dinner and drinks as people who may only see each other face to face for these three days of the year catch up.
The next morning everything kicks off. Tables are arranged amongst four judges – one captain, two seniors, and one junior. Everything is tasted blind, with nothing but the style, %abv and any non-standard ingredients (for any judges with serious allergies) displayed. The last few years have seen the mechanics of the judging finally brought online, with scores and notes being entered into a LIM system, which has been a great boon to anyone downstream who had the job of interpreting the handwriting…
Describing the judging process superficially (drinking beer and discussing it all day), it sounds like the best job in the world, and it is, sort of. What is less easy to communicate is the intense pace and pressure that’s an integral part of it. I’ve described it as the air traffic control of drinking.
This year saw over six hundred entries assessed, with almost eighty beers passing over my table over the two days of judging. There are a great many skills at work when assigning a consistent, considered and (hopefully) cogent mark to a beer, but efficiency is the one you have to work the hardest. More than eight minutes on a given beer and your table is likely falling behind.
Everything from appearance to the slightly ephemeral but nonetheless crucial ‘drinkability’ is scored, eventually constituting a mark out of a hundred. An initial phase sees all judges assemble their scores and notes on an entry, which is then uploaded to the LIM for phase two, where consistency is checked and further discussion of the beer takes place across the table. The wait before one’s score is displayed against everyone else’s is easily the most nerve wracking – if you’ve given a beer an eighty while the rest of the table are on a sixty-two, then you’ve got some explaining to do.
Once all entries have been judged, any considered to be of gold medal status (typically eighty-five points or above) will be re-judged by a panel of table captains. These beers will go head to head, with only the single best out of every category being awarded a coveted Best In Class trophy. Once this vast sum of judging telemetry has been assembled and officiated, the brewers of the various entries finally receive their results. The winners will get to update their labels with those crucially consumer attracting medals, or join the year’s Top-30, in the case of New World. For those who miss out, the notes from the judges will ideally serve as a guide to assist with the improvement and development of their beers in the future.
And that, in a very rudimentary nutshell, is how you make a great beer, officially. For those interested in keeping up with which ones are the hot ticket this year, the Australian International Beer Awards
results have already been published, and include a compelling number of New Zealand entries. The New World Top-30 is due to be unveiled very close to the release of this issue, and the Brewers Guild Awards winners have already been announced. If you’re not a follower of craft beer then don’t worry, ordinary beers like Monteiths can (and have) come out on top of the micro-brewed stuff on occasion.
