The privilege of being able to carefully taste 146 winning beers was a special and unique experience. At first, though, I really didn’t appreciate what a great opportunity I had before me. It seemed a disciplined task (yeah, right, tough job, but someone had to do it), an insurmountable pile of beer to be sorted, tasted, prodded and evaluated for this project. It wasn’t until I had tasted about thirty or forty beers that I began to realize how different this tasting was from any other I had conducted before. Here were 146 beers judged the best by an extremely competent panel of professionals from all over the world. No judge or other person had ever tasted all of the winners before.
By beer number thirty or forty I began to realize there was a common thread with all of the winning beers, no matter what the style. Before me I had an answer to the question “What makes a beer a winner?”
Judges evaluate beers according to adherence to style as well as the beer’s overall cleanness. Much to the judges’ credit, nearly all of the first-place beers were perfectly matched to the style descriptors—at least in accordance with sensory assessments. The most important realization for me was that every single beer was clean. Odd or exaggerated fermentation and packaging characters (diacetyl, acetaldehyde, DMS |dimethylsulfide|, obtrusive esters, highersolventlike alcohols, bacterial byproducts, oxidation, staling compounds, light-struck character, etc.) were totally absent in the Gold Cup beers, except where appropriate in certain styles. It was the malt and hops that were the primary indicators of character, with the light character of fermentation often contributing to the winning edge.
Silver and Bronze Cups were awarded to many beers that could have won the Gold. They had the minimum standards of a Gold Cup beer. But when minimum Gold standards were not perceived, often judges would drift toward choosing a second-or third-place winner on the merits of a beer’s cleanness, rather than perfect adherence to style. It seems judges were more flexible and forgiving when a beer appeared a little out of style than they would be for a beer with fermentation or processing flaws.
It was fun for me to compare my sensory evaluation skills to brewery data and laboratory analysis. I learned a lot about my biases and have since attempted to readjust some of my sensory processing skills.
In most cases there was nothing really surprising in the brewery recipe formulations. Hops, malt and yeast do not a beer make. These words could not be truer. These winning beers and the beers you will brew will be a further testament to the skill of the brewer; your skill as a homebrewer. It’s the passion, the love, the craft, the skill, the life the brewer gives to a written list of ingredients that really are the true measure of a winner. In these ways, the winners of the 1996 World Beer Cup represent the pride we all have as homebrewers.