BJCP Score Sheet App

Events & Comps
1

Hello from Germany! Over the past couple of months I’ve built a small web app for a friend that helps her to run wine tasting events on a semi-professional level. The app replaces the scoring sheets that she hands out to the guests with an online version. This is great for the guests as they can access the notes later on, as well as her as she can analyse the notes and follow up with personalised messaging based on the tasting profile.

I’m now doing a bit of research to see if this app could be any useful in other ways. Someone on Reddit pointed me to the score sheets that are used for AHA/BJCP sanctioned competitions and issues around readability and preparing the results.

I don’t know much about how these competitions work so I thought I just ask here to see if this would be any useful? As far as I can see every judge would just use their phone to fill out the form instead of writing them down. Is there a process of submitting results that could be automated as well? I found software that helps to organise competitions but none of them seems to handle score collection?

I’ve released a beta version of my app here: https://www.viaromy.com Right now the test is not public but if you’re curious you can signup under https://www.viaromy.com/signup/ and play around. I would have to build in quite a bit functionality to make it work for this particular case. But I’m building this for fun (and to sharpen my programming skills). Would be great if it would actually be used by someone :slight_smile:

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You’d have better luck asking at the forum at bjcp.org

3

Yes, feel free to post on the BJCP forum or our FB page, where this post would be more appropriate.

The discussion of digital scoresheets has come up before in BJCP spaces, and there are varying opinions. I personally think it poses too much risk (spills and broken devices) and hassle trying to get judges to use technology. There are already so many things to worry about as a comp organizer that I don’t want to add IT HelpDesk to the list of jobs. To me, it would be annoying to type out score sheets on a small phone screen while trying to also hold and evaluate the beer. One-handed phone typing is probably slower than handwriting for most. I can see an issue being keeping everyone’s devices powered; sometimes judging is held in locations with limited access to resources. Another consideration is how would the scoresheets from your app make their way from the judges to the entrants.

So, I don’t see a phone app for BJCP score sheets being all that useful in a competition setting. It might be useful for someone practicing for the BJCP exam or filling out score sheets in a non-comp setting for a friend or club member, but that’s a pretty low-use scenario.