Oakham’s Attila from Cambridgeshire has been selected Champion Beer of Britain. This is a 7.5% Barley Wine described by the brewery as having “fruity notes and an elderberry aroma, with the taste of ripe red berries and citrus fruit and a long bitter fruity finish”. It tasted wonderful, and I’d hardly argue with that description.
Here’s how it was selected… I got recruited to serve beers at the tasting so got to see the process for the first time.
The Winter Festival tastes beers in four categories: Old Ales and Strong Milds, Stouts, Porters, and Barley Wines. There were five or six beers in each category; each beer had won a tasting at a local festival.
The judging panels for each category consisted of five people selected by the competition organizer. The leader of each tasting panel was an experienced beer taster. The rest of the panel contained a mix of brewers, pub owners, and novice tasters – there was a real effort to get a cross-section of experience. Each taster received a packet of material beforehand describing the attributes and expectations for their category of beer. The objective is to judge how well each beer expresses the style, not just whether a taster ‘likes the beer’.
There are five bars at the Winter Festival. One of the bars contains only the beers in competition for the champion beer.
The tasters meet at a round table in an isolated room, and have a scoring sheet with columns for each coded beer, with space for four considerations: appearance, aroma, taste and after-taste. They code each 1-10. The scoring weights taste heavier than the other three considerations. The leader calls for beers one at a time. The serving people (my colleague and I served for the Stout tasting team) then take their trays to the champion beer bar and collect coded glasses with samples of the first beer. This process continues until all six beers are tasted. During the scoring discussion among the tasters is encouraged.
The logistics for all this is impressive. Including requests for re-tastes, we handled over 100 glasses of beer, and to my knowledge none got mixed up…
Competions like this are a big deal to British brewers, with significant commercial impact. The festival trade session followed the announcement of the results, and trade discussion of the judging and results was pretty intense.