A watching brief at the Beer Oscars

Last month saw the great and good of the beer world descend on the town of Burton-on-Trent for the event, which has successfully managed to appropriate the description ‘The Oscars of Beer’.

I’ve been invited to judge many beer competitions, and it’s a pleasure and a privilege each time. But I’ll never be invited to judge the International Brewing Awards​. That’s because I’m not a brewer. And here, like the Academy, the only people allowed to judge beer are those who brew it themselves.

Happily, I was invited to ‘observe’ instead, something that made me feel like I should be walking around with a flak jacket with ‘UN’ stencilled in large letters across the back. I had to make do with a laminate saying ‘Press’ — cool, but not quite as cool as the flak jacket.

It’s always a bitter-sweet experience spending a few days in Burton, roaming around the hallowed spaces of legendary breweries and imagining how the pubs, the streets and especially the National Brewery Centre (NBC) might look if they were run by someone who understood or cared about the town’s brewing heritage.

But for this competition, Burton offers many advantages. Brewers from around the world love to come and spend time in a place around which their ideas about beer are defined.

And the town’s continued importance as a brewing centre means there are ex-brewers — including retired master brewers — and many others who have spent their lives around beer who are only too happy to give up a few days of their time to sort out backroom arrangements.

And what a task that is.

Nowhere to hide​
The competition incorporates cask, keg and bottled beers — almost 1,000 in total from nearly 50 countries. Each beer is analysed for colour and ABV — if it’s stronger than it claims, that may form an unfair advantage. The casks have to condition in a marquee in the grounds of the NBC until they are in perfect condition. The sudden arrival of snow on the first day of judging means a rush on heaters to keep the temperature inside perfectly optimal. Kegs and bottles are kept at two separate temperatures in one room. Entrant brewers have specified how their beers should be served, meaning a mix of gases and dispense heads.

And from this maze of serving complexity, the right beers had to be served at the right time to the right table of brewers, using a complex system to ensure no judge knows what they are tasting.

There’s a cynicism among many British brewers these days that you can brew a beer ‘to win awards’. If you’ve had some experience of the category you’re entering, you know what the norm will be, and a clever brewer knows just what twist to pull to make their beer stand out to a jaded judge’s palate.

Here, among brewers, that’s tougher to do. They judge in small groups, first looking for any technical faults, and then for consumer appeal. Is this something they would order a second pint of? Is it something they would travel to taste again? Then, rather than scoring individually, each table of judges must reach a consensus on what beers they want to go through in what order. There’s nowhere for quirks or faults to hide.

This can lead to some surprising winners. Every now and then, when the results are read out after the final day’s judging, the audience of beer-industry hopefuls looks quizzically at each other, as if to say: “That beer? I mean, yeah, fine, it’s all right, but it’s nothing special.”

But within a judging process that inevitably prioritises technical excellence and commercial appeal over quirky character, there are still special beers that shine through. After the first day’s judging, the organisers are buzzing about one of the lager categories, where judges from three separate continents had simultaneously said: “That one,” with no need for discussion. For the rest of the week they remain desperate to find out what it was.

Step forward Camden Hells. I taste a stray bottle of it at some point, and the peppery hops are singing. I wonder if this is the one they tasted. Sure enough, when the category was announced, it takes gold.

Cider was also reincorporated into the competition for the first time in decades, reflecting its current success. Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising result of all is the newly launched Carling cider winning gold. I remind myself that the judges do not know what they are tasting when they make their decisions.

Perhaps the main lesson from the International Brewing Awards is that you should always taste something before forming an opinion on it — something all of us, each with our own prejudices, need to be reminded of occasionally.