Competitions for homebrewers have become very popular over the past few years.  Just in September alone, there are over 60 competitions sanctioned by the American Homebrewers Association and the Beer Judge Certification Program.  Our homebrew club, the Brewers of South Suburbia (BOSS) organize an annual competition, called the Chicago Cup, and one of the ongoing challenges is recruiting enough credentialed judges.  

BOSS is fortunate to have a number of members who are credentialed judges, although we only have two highly-ranked judges, at the National level - John Dalton and Dick Van Dyke.  Most of those members became judges a few years ago and fewer have joined the ranks in recent years, until a couple of years ago when Bill Goetz, Scott Pointon and I went through the process.   But for the Chicago Cup to run well, we need 50 or more judges.  

So, the club is beginning a process of encouraging and supporting members who want to become credentialed beer judges, or current judges who want to progress upward in rank.  

We're hosting an exam on Saturday February 7th, 2015.  Exams have to be scheduled through the BJCP, which limits the number of exams scheduled per month, because of the resources it takes to evaluate and grade all those exams.  For us, we scheduled this exam last autumn, about 15 months ahead, but it was the first open slot available to us.  In BJCP-speak, I'm the exam sponsor and my friend and club-mate John Dalton is the exam director.  

We began talking up the possibility of an exam a couple of years ago, at our monthly meetings but also privately, one-on-one, with some club members who I thought would possibly be interested and would make good judges.  From those conversations, it became clear that people wanted an exam preparation group, so I set one up, meeting every other month or so in the year leading up to the exam, to help folks pass the exam when they take it.  

Seven club members have been participating in this prep group and its been great fun getting together with them.  Also, other club members who are already judges have been joining us, to help with those who are preparing and also, perhaps, because they are planning to retake the exam and are hoping to hone their evaluation skills, too.  

At our first two sessions, we spent a lot of time going over the basics.  There are really two aspects - perceiving what is in the beer and then communicating that to the brewer through the evaluation form and scoresheet.  We work on both in the group.  

After those first two sessions, members of the group had the opportunity to judge at the Chicago Cup.  Because they are uncredentialed, they were paired up with more senior judges.  This was great experience, to go through the actual practice of judging at a competition.  
Since then, when we meet, we've been spending a brief amount of time talking at the beginning of the session about some issue that I hope will help them, but then spending most of our time tasting beers and filling out the beer evaluation and scoresheets.  

These tastings have been within style groupings - for example, at our last session, we focused on what the BJCP calls style category #15, German wheat and rye beers.  There are four substyles within this category, all related to each other but distinct - Weisen, Dunkelweisen, Weisenboch, and Rye.  We read through the style guidelines for the subcategory, taste either a homemade or professionally brewed example of the style, fill our the scoresheets just as we would at a competition, then discuss it afterward.

 
Currently, the exam is full, with eight folks who are new judges and four experienced judges who are looking to advance in the BJCP.  Eleven of the test takers are from BOSS and one is from Wisconsin.  I have a small waiting list of two at this point.