Mystic 3.4% Golden Ale and Beer Judging
Mystic is our seasonal beer for the second half of August. Brewed at 3.4% to be easy drinking in the summer heat, I’ve used a mix of new and classic hops to try and make a fairly traditional beer with a hint of modern fruitiness to it. The main hop is a variety called Mystic (hence the name!) which was only officially released recently, while the other is First Gold, originally sold in 1996.
Mystic is a nice blend of the old and new, contributing traditional blackcurrant flavours as well as orange and passion fruit. First Gold adds a spicy & citrus character reminiscent of more classic English beers; the combination therefore hopefully evoking those classics while also showing off a modern twist. Crystal malt has also been added to the grist, for a little bit of colour and malty sweetness.
Obviously, every time I design & produce a recipe, I’m trying to make the best beer I possibly can, but what exactly does best mean? It’s somewhat of a subjective term – at the end of the day best to you is whatever you like. But we send our beer off to competitions, and they can’t just be decided by whatever the judges’ tastes are, so how do you judge beer objectively?
I recently went to judge at the SIBA North East Independent Beer Awards in Sheffield. I mentioned in my last blog that the most important thing a style descriptor can do is let the customer know what they’re getting before they buy a beer, and to that end the beers are judged against how well they fit those style descriptions. Each session, a table of judges will assess one category of beers – everyone first tastes a beer and makes individual notes, and then discuss their opinions and how they would score it. The head judge for the table leads this discussion and finds a consensus on a score, which is later fed back to the brewer with comments. Some competitions just give a first, second & third place; in the case of SIBA, all beers scoring 90-100 get gold, 80-89 get silver, and 70-79 get bronze.
There are a couple of different style guides available, but the one I tend to use when I’m designing recipes (and is used as reference in SIBA competitions) is produced by the Beer Judge Certification Programme, which gives details such as expected strength, bitterness, colour and ingredients – for over a hundred styles! It’s important to note that while I use the guidelines as a basis for a recipe, they shouldn’t be restrictive – using Mystic as an example, the recipe is within the expected bands for colour and bitterness but is below the suggested ABV. I’ve made this choice with the expectation that the resulting beer is still recognisably a golden ale but is distinguished from Sebright which is part of our core range at 3.8%.
I really enjoy judging at beer competitions, because I think it’s a good way to understand trends in the industry, learn from peers and improve my own understanding of styles and flavours. And talking of competitions, we’ve won a couple of awards recently from the British Bottlers Institute and Great Taste Awards – check our social media for details of those!
