We sometimes get questions about how to create a BJCP-like organization within another country. While there are advantages to organizing on a country basis, we really think people in this situation should become part of the BJCP and help us understand your specific needs.
Our recommendation is that you should start by organizing a group of people who want to join the BJCP and helping study for the exam. We can arrange to give an exam in your country, but you should be contacting the BJCP Exam Directors not the Competition Director. The Exam Directors schedule exams, and often allow international exams to be scheduled if the exam calendar is already full.
If you organize a group as described, then you can use all the BJCP materials we have available. If you are trying to set up an independent organization that is not related to the BJCP, then you cannot use our copyrighted materials and you cannot create derivative works from our copyrighted materials.
If you take the exam and become BJCP members, we would welcome your input on local styles and examples. We have already published several styles contributed by members in various countries; these can be found on our International Resources page.
Keep in mind that you can have country-specific organizations for homebrewers or brewers and still be affiliated with the BJCP for judging. For example, the state organizations in Brazil are state-sponsored and quite structured. Australia as well has state organizations that work together on a national level. Ireland has a national level organization that was composed of local homebrew clubs.
If you have judges that take the BJCP exam, you can have a local chapter of the BJCP. That’s more for your own benefit than ours; we just see you all as judges in our organization. But it should help how you organize competitions, exams, training, and other events. What we refer to as a ‘chapter’ is merely a way for us to think of all the judges in your country as a group; we would expect there to be one or two people as main points of contact for us. That way we know we are addressing your needs more directly than trying to reach out to each individual member.
You can use the BJCP materials to train judges, help with exams, use in competitions, etc. We are just a certifying organization for judges. The judges would then also belong to your national organization, where they would do their work. If people take the BJCP exam, they will become BJCP judges. They can certainly belong to other organizations where they can use these skills.
So the BJCP doesn’t have any problem with organizing BJCP judges within a country into another organization, as long as the judges are taking a BJCP exam. We will view each of the judges individually as members in our organization. But your organization can help facilitate all the various events. We actually recommend that people in various countries have a structure like this.
If you create an organization as described, you shouldn’t have any problem with using our materials. We are more interested in seeing people be able to evaluate beer properly than anything else.
We look forward to working with you. If you have exam-related questions, please contact [email protected]. If you have questions about how to organize your judges or get started, you can contact the appropriate BJCP Representative for your international region. We do have interest in many countries for additional exams, and will likely be adding more to the calendar in the future. To schedule an exam, we like to see that there are a large number of people who wish to take it. That helps us justify having proctors come out, although it helps if you can share in the transportation costs.