Low-Cost Way to Have Your Beer Evaluated
One thing that novice and developing brewers can have a problem with is understanding, detecting, and correcting faults in our beers. Some of us just don't know that some of the flavor in our beer is actually a fault and we don't do anything about it. Getting an objective assessment from a trained and experienced beer judge can help bridge that gap from being unaware to working on a solution.
The cheapest way to get help is to be a member of a local homebrew club and enlist the palate of the most skilled and knowledgeable club members to give you their assessment of your latest masterpiece. Bring your beer to meetings and let others taste it. Ask for honest assessments, not platitudes. Hopefully, they are experienced BJCP judges. Sitting with them and having them point out to you what they taste (good and bad) and what it might have been a product of, is a great way to tune your palate to recognize those features and faults and move your brewing to enhancing or fixing them. Hopefully, you have a good club around you with skilled beer judges.
A second way is to enter your beer into competition. Good competitions have experienced BJCP judges at every judging station to help assure that a decent assessment of your beer is conducted. Unfortunately, experienced judges are a rare commodity and sometimes you get "Joe" off the street corner who knows little about beer, but was pressed into service by the competition organizer. Its a shame, but its a fact of life. So competitions may not always provide you with good feedback. In addition, you don't have the chance to sit with a judge to taste the beer with them to get direct feedback and guidance on what is being tasted.
A third way is to learn to judge beer yourself. The Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) provides anyone with the nomenclature of beer, its flavors, and its faults. Unfortunately, you can't get everything you need from the written word. You have to be instructed by hands on (tongue on?) experience with experienced tasters to illustrate what is good and bad. Find a BJCP training class in your area.
A forth way is to volunteer to be a Steward at a BJCP beer competition and ask to taste the beer samples as the judges discuss their findings. That is how you can start to understand the good and bad aspects of beer. Listening, tasting, and correlating those flavors and faults can help you understand the flavor of your own beer and how to make it better.
Enjoy!
