Here’s the secret about beer judging: to paraphrase Lance Armstrong, it’s not about the beer. Sure, there’s the challenge of putting your sensory perception skills to the test, and coming face-to-face with your own ignorance. But really, people don’t sign up to beer judging competitions for a multi-day conveyor belt of oxidized, infected, or just plain dull beer.
What they’re really there for are the other judges. You could, as I did, find yourself sitting in a farmhouse brewery in deepest Belgian mining country on a wet autumn evening, underneath fluorescent lights as “Purple Rain” shuffles into “Ace of Spades,” surrounded by award-winning beer writers, publicans, and yeast fanatics.
Competitions like the Brussels Beer Challenge (which, in proper Belgian surrealist tradition, doesn’t actually take place in Brussels) are essentially multi-day networking sessions, with some judging attached. With the density of industry movers, it’s a situation primed for deal-making—who’s on the judging circuit, how to get on the circuit, whose magazine is looking for contributors. Those conversations—a mix of gossip and probing questions and name-dropping—don’t happen during walking buffets, but during late-night pub crawls, beer dinners, and, in this case, next to the stainless steel of a Wallonian family’s brewhouse.
