Amen brother! I’m a judge but relatively new at it. I cannot tell you how much I learned about competitions by actually being put in the judge’s role, where you have to do your best with the tools you have. It’s not easy, even after the first few beers and you feel like you are doing it well.
Fatigue is real, biases are real, the personalities of your fellow judges are at play too. It’s a human endeavor that isn’t perfect and cannot be. It’s fun and it’s work and it’s a volunteer effort. I do my best to give honest feedback that is helpful; the score is my best estimate of where the entry stands in relationship to the standard. Entrants should be respectful of that.
I am a judge, just a time limited one. I have two years to retake and pass the judging exam before my status is changed to “Affiliated.”
I do not fear failing the exam again. I attempted to pull off something that is very difficult to accomplish when I went from not knowing how the BJCP was organized to sitting for the online and judging exams within the period of a week. I passed the on-line exam and came very close to passing the beer judging exam without judging a single contest, taking a BJCP prep course, or spending months in the woodshed with a stack of beer scoring sheets (I filled out a total of two score sheets before sitting for the exam). I scored at the master level on the scoring section of the exam on five out of six beers. Where I fell down on the job was on the “fill out the white space” portions of the exam. Quick frankly, that part of the beer judging exam requires practice. Knowing what’s right or wrong with a beer does not automatically translate to being able to clearly describe one’s perceptions within a short period of time using standard BJCP terminology. Being able to describe a beer using BJCP terminology under time constraints only comes from doing.
With that said, the reason why I will more than likely not re-sit for the exam is because I have little interest in booking a road trip to make it happen. The last exam in my state until early 2016 is later this month. I am number 20 on the wait list. The exams in surrounding states are either already booked beyond capacity or are reserving their seats for candidates who are taking a locally taught BJCP prep course (which I cannot fault). There’s a high probability that I will lose interest in re-sitting for the beer judging exam by 2016. I only sat for it the first time because the opportunity fell into my lap.
I was not questioning your abilities. in fact I was implying that the program would be better for your inclusion. as you say, the only way to learn is to do, which means right now, even without re-sitting the exam you can start to improve the quality of BJCP judging. I don’t know about where you live but here there is always a seat at a judging table for a provisional, novice, or even non-bjcp judge at just about every competition.
I’m simply encouraging you to take action instead of quibbling over numbers that you as a hobby scientist must realize are more or less meaningless coming from many homebrewers, me included. My numbers are helpful for me to adjust recipes and duplicate brews but I have no illusions that if I sent my wort and beer in for analysis those numbers would bear little resemblance to the ones I have in my software.
