West
Brian Cooper
First I would like to thank our departing Rep, Travis Hammond, for his dedicated work in the West over the last 6 years. He has constantly offered his advice and assistance to members, often traveling to help others with competitions, exams, or judge education. Enjoy those retirement Mai Tais, sir — however we are certain you’ll remain very active in judging and judge education.
Our region plans to continue many of the good practices Travis put into place. I will continue to hold bi-monthly calls with our Assistant Reps, for discussion of National and Regional topics, as well as member concerns. Through these, we bring attention to important issues, sharing what we’ve heard and observed. As items bubble up from the membership we discuss them, and work to identify ways to take positive action. These meetings have been an excellent tool to stay engaged with what is going on in the wider judging community, and keep our team strong.
Speaking of the team — special thanks to Assistant Rep Oleg Shpyrko for running a strong campaign against me for the West Rep position. We had a number of constructive discussions about our goals and ideas for the BJCP, and we are well aligned on many topics. Running friendly campaigns against each other meant reaching out to many area judges, which has helped spark awareness of the election and shed light on issues important to our members. Oleg has agreed to continue in his role as Assistant Rep for the San Diego area.
Continuing on with our team of Assistant Reps will be Jeff Koehler for Los Angeles and Cindy Goldstein for Hawaii. They are doing a great job in their respective areas, and it has been excellent working with them over the years. We’ve also enjoyed the occasional chances to gather together, such as at Homebrew Con (which we’ll miss this year), exams, etc. I also plan to appoint a new Assistant Rep to help support Nevada soon.
We are excited and proud to welcome the judges from Nevada into our newly expanded West Region. We have seen great support and involvement from their judges over the years. I have worked prior with a number of these Nevada-based judges, and will stay in tune with concerns coming from judges and clubs across the state. We look forward to a fruitful and collaborative relationship.
Despite the good things that are happening, we find this time of pandemic has proven to be a great challenge for BJCP judges, competitions, judge education, and exams alike. Most areas have been fairly quiet for the last few months, with many of the usual competitions and events canceled or postponed. Exam administrators report uncertainty, as state and local restrictions vary, and can change on a moment’s notice.
Hawaii reports that their judging scene is pretty much in hibernation. They did hold the Kona Brewers Festival homebrew competition in early March, literally while shutdowns were beginning and the festival itself was canceled. In Los Angeles we are hearing similar reports of competitions and judging at a virtual standstill. A planned exam for August is facing uncertainty over challenges that need to be faced, such as identifying an appropriate venue that will allow them to proceed safely.
Still, we are beginning to see some signs of life. Judges are learning to cope and finding ways to keep things going, including online sessions and distanced or remote judging. Checking in with Northern California Exam administrators, it seems many of our planned exams are working to reduce the risk by putting special practices in place, offering socially distanced exams, where possible.
In San Diego, they’ve adjusted in order to continue some level of activity with exams and education. They are holding a Cider Exam on July 25th, with Travis Hammond leading a remote cider exam course tied to that. Bay Area cider judge Pavel Anisimov plans to travel to the exam site, to assist the locals. The area has also continued some judging, including a socially distanced Club-Only competition, following careful practices at a well-ventilated outdoor venue.
Although NHC was canceled, judging sites have shown strong dedication. San Francisco is working to complete remote and distanced in-person judging of the entries, and even plans to announce winners for each category. They are aiming to have their judging complete by the end of Homebrew Con weekend, and should be making an announcement then.
The San Diego NHC Regionals site likewise reports that they have pressed on with distanced judging to provide unofficial feedback to the entrants, evaluating the entries and sending the scoresheets back to brewers. They also donated half of NHC entry bottles to distill into hand sanitizer in the early stages of the pandemic, when it was in especially short supply.
For Nevada — in the Reno area, they are seeing competitions on pause, either canceled or postponed. In Las Vegas, which has firmly planned Written and Judging exams for early August, the study group has already moved from remote online classes to resumption of distanced in-person meetings. Still, returning to anything resembling a normal level of activity in our region will certainly take some time, and depend on many factors.
Once again, thank you to the judges from our region who voted to entrust me with this position, as your new Regional Rep. I will always make myself available to assist our judges, organizers, and educators. When problems or complaints arise, I will work with my team and the Board as needed, to resolve them as fairly and reasonably as possible. If judges have questions or ideas, including things the organization could do better in the future, I’m always happy to listen and respond to these.
I look forward to working more closely with the judges in our newly expanded region. Stay safe, and be well, all.
Europe, Middle East, Africa
Omer Basha
In this first update since our region was formed, I’d like to share some regional news, let you know about some changes on the horizon and about future projects.
First let me introduce our new assistant reps:
- Ariel Caballero is the assistant rep for Spain and Portugal area. Ariel organizes tasting and written exams in the Barcelona area and has helped train many of the region’s judges.
- Marek Kaminski is the assistant rep for Central and Eastern Europe. Marek is a professional brewer, a co-founder and president of Polish Craft Brewers Association and is very involved in serving the brewing community in Central and Eastern Europe.
- Sarah Pantry is the assistant rep for UK and Ireland area. Sarah is an extremely active judge from the UK. She is a co-founder of the UK Brewer’s Association and is a key part of the BJCP community in the UK; organizing competitions, creating CEP events and uploading them to the Association’s YouTube Channel and more.
- Chris Roth is the assistant rep for Africa. Chris is an extremely active National judge who is always the first to show up for BJCP events. Chris administers exams in South Africa on a regular basis and has helped train many of Africa’s judges.
Our EMEA region assistant reps and I will hold an open quarterly conference call to share news from our areas, resources, ideas, questions, and to talk about issues facing the organization, you are all welcome to join, listen and let us know your opinions on the discussed topics. I also want to extend a big thanks to Ali Kocho-Williams who served as the Europe Assistant Rep in the International region.
The BJCP EMEA Region has been affected as the rest of the world by COVID-19. I would like to extend my condolences to those who lost their loved ones from the virus. Many events were cancelled or postponed, and as we begin to go back to normal now, I ask you to please stay safe in any activity. As always, our region was supposed to be very active in the past quarter and here are a few updates:
- The March Barcelona, Spain exam supposed to be held at BBF is rescheduled to July 25th.
- The April Aachen, Germany exam is rescheduled towards the end of the year, specific date will be published.
- The April, Valladolid, Spain exam is rescheduled to October 23rd.
- The May Beer Sheva, Israel exam was rescheduled to June 12th.
- The June Lisbon, Portugal exam is rescheduled to July 2021.
- The September Beer Sheva, Israel Cider exam and Cologne, Germany Beer exam are still on schedule.
- The October London exam is cancelled, the 20-seat limit was moved to the March 2021 London exam.
- If you were supposed to hold training and CEP events, please consider giving them via Zoom. It also has the added benefit that the class can be recorded and published to YouTube for later use.
I hope that these though times will pass soon, and that we will be able to go back to our old routines and enjoy meeting for competitions, exams, festivals and conferences.
A few topics I wanted to discuss:
- One great way to have competitions and earn experience points during these times is to organize small club competitions of up to 30 entries. You will not need many judges to judge such a competition and each judge can get up to 2 points for a competition this size. It’s a great way to earn points without much work for organizers.
- Anyone can register a competition with the BJCP, you do not need to be a member or even have any BJCP judge in the competition. If the judges, stewards or organizer do join the BJCP at some point, they will get these points retroactively.
- Our region has the widest linguistic diversity in the world. Personally, I’m a big supporter of judging competitions in local languages. To facilitate this, I am working on proposing a translations project for competition and exam materials to local languages. If you have any translated materials, please contact me so that we won’t retranslate materials that are ready. As a temporary measure, I have been uploading translated resources to the EMEA Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/BJCPEMEA/), since it may take some time to make them available through the BJCP website. More updates on the translation project will be announced soon.
- The BJCP offers a Continuing Education Program (CEP). I know that our region has many training classes, and the organizers, presenters and trainees can get experience points for these classes. Any judge can organize a continuing education event. Just follow these guidelines and earn points: http://dev.bjcp.org/education-training/program-information/. If you run into any problems or need any help applying for a CEP event, please contact me.
- If you live in a country which does not have a local active BJCP chapter and you wish to start one, please me or one of the assistant reps. The BJCP offers travel stipends for proctors for exams and the examinees will only pay the normal fees. The assistant reps and I will be happy to help you with locating proctors, answering questions about the application process and exam administration and everything else you will need to have a successful kickstart of the organization in your country.
- A Call for help! Many exam sites in our region have too many trainees for their assigned exam slots. This can result in trainees waiting for a considerable time to take the BJCP tasting exam. The exam directorate has procedures in place to ask for a seat limit increase, but this requires locating four active exam graders. At the moment we have very few exam graders in our region, so these requests fall on the same people again and again. If you are a National level judge, you can sign up to become an exam grader. You will need to take an online grader training course that you get three experience points for completing: http://dev.bjcp.org/faq/become-grader/ (it takes about two hours). Once you complete the course you need to contact the managing exam director, Sarah Bridegroom, and ask to be added to the graders schedule when you have time to grade a set. To be eligible to help with seat increase limit applications you have to grade at least two exam sets. If you wish to advance through the ranks, I think there is no better way to maximize your tasting exam score than to learn what graders are looking for. If you already completed the training or an exam grader, please let me know.
Finally, I want to thank all of you for everything you do at a local level. We are looking for local contacts for countries in the region, to help spread the BJCP at the local level, if you wish to be listed, please let myself or your assistant regional rep know if you might be interested in going down that path.
Northeast
Andrew Luberto
Greetings Fellow Northeast Judges!
First, I want to thank you for your support. I am humbled and grateful to become your Northeast Representative. I look forward to engaging with many of you in the coming months and years at competitions, exams, seminars, and conferences. As the region continues its steady recovery as the epicenter of the global pandemic, I would like to extend my heartfelt sympathy to anyone who suffered during this time. The BJCP has rightfully continued a policy of flexibility during these challenging times and I encourage you to reach out to myself or the appropriate directorate if changes to previously registered BJCP-related events are needed. Additionally, there are numerous articles about judging in a post-Covid environment in the current Bulletin, I encourage you to check them out.
I have put forth to the board three nominees for assistant representatives that would cover most of our region. I’m looking forward to working with them and holding monthly meetings to plan, discuss, and coordinate a variety of actions to benefit the membership of our region and grow the BJCP. I hope to share the assistant reps and their contact information shortly. These assistants will be instrumental in fielding questions, supporting education and exams, and helping to judge many regional competitions.
In my first few weeks as Northeast Representative I have reached out to all the directorates and have spoken to most. These have all been productive discussions and I look forward to continuing them with added input from our regional membership. I’ve also corresponded with a number of representatives from our regions on a range of issues and personal philosophies on the future of the BJCP.
One of my first goals as Representative is to increase the number of National+ judges in our region. If you are interested in becoming a National judge or higher, reach out to me and the Northeast Rep team will work with you to achieve that. I fully believe that anyone who wants to attain the rank of National in the BJCP can do so. So if you’re thinking about going for it I encourage you to do so and seek advice from my team. We can help administer or organize a written exam, facilitate or assist in educational opportunities, or simply answer your questions.
Another goal for the region is to increase the number of mead and cider certifications. The Northeast Region has a historic connection to cider and has likewise seen steady growth in both the commercial and hobbyist realms of cider and mead making. There are multiple mead-centric BJCP sanctioned competitions in our region that are in need of qualified mead judges and I would wager that the beginning of cider only competitions in the Northeast are not far behind. As such, I would like to continue to see the growth of these certifications in our area through administering Mead/Cider exams and facilitating prep classes.
Lastly, I want to improve regional communication both organizationally and member-to-member. I will be using the regional BJCP email list to regularly communicate – asking for input, addressing regional concerns, and spreading information about regional events. There will be periodic Google Forms sent out for membership input and coordinated virtual events for people to connect.
My (soon to be) team and I are very excited to get started and are looking forward to working for you these next few years. Don’t forget there’s a members announcements section in the bulletin and we’re always looking for content if you have something you’d like to contribute.
Cheers!
Andrew
Midwest
Sandy Cockerham
The last quarter has been pretty quiet in the Midwest with competitions and exams being cancelled pretty much everywhere. I have certainly missed traveling throughout my Region meeting up with BJCP judges and competition organizers.
In early May I started getting asked to speak with club members via Zoom/StreamYard (and maybe one more platform.)
On May 16, I met with women brewers and BJCP judges from Mexico as part of ADELITAS – Cerveceras Con Temple. For about an hour, I conversed with the women hosting and answered questions sent in by the audience. It was an enjoyable conversation. I was asked about my brewing and judging experience and then answered questions about the BJCP.
On May 20, I had a 2 hour meeting with members of several Florida Homebrew Clubs (which included quite a few friends) as part of the Hogtown Brewers Club “Hogtown Edu-Qation Webinars.” The format was similar to the one with the women from Mexico, I got to talk about my history with beer and the BJCP. We discussed things like the guidelines, exams, some of our favorite events that were cancelled and had some fun social time.
May 31 This was a series that was put on by a group in South America. Fabian Lara, from Chile, asked me to participate as the 10th speaker in a 10 speaker series on educational topics. I spoke about my judging experiences and answered questions about the BJCP (some of which I wasn’t really ready for, that group dug deep for their queries!)
On June 10 I had a Zoom meeting with members of a study group from the Kansas City Biermeisters (a club near and dear to my heart as my very first judging experience was at the 24th Annual KCBM Competition in February of 2007.) We met to discuss my thoughts on the BJCP Written exam and to provide them with what I thought were important things to cover. Interestingly enough, this is the only one of my talks that was covering part of my region, but the BJCP is everywhere!
I hope everyone in the BJCP is staying healthy and using the down time to do something for yourself (physically and/or mentally.) Cheers!
Asia-Pacific
Christopher Wong
No updates at this time
North
Brian Joas
No updates at this time
Latin America
Diego Setti
No updates at this time
Mountain/Northwest
Dennis Mitchell
No updates at this time
South
Phil Farrell
No updates at this time
Mid-Atlantic
Gordon Strong
No updates at this time