Beer Radar
By John Krüger
(First published in Wine Business Magazine in 2012)
Judgement Day
So after a heap of phone calls and emails, I’m on my way in for my first stint as an associate beer judge for commercial beers at the first Royal Adelaide Beer Show since the 1800’s and I’m quite excited. I also know that my father is about to go in for the second session of heart surgery sometime that day. I’ve got my phone on silent but the whole day I’m praying that it doesn’t start vibrating with an urgent call from the hospital. I’m also expecting some amazing beers about to be tasted over the next two days, and I’m going be smack bang in the middle of an impressive group of beer professionals. Yes, it was a sausage fest but I’ve been assured that this balance will change. Behind the PR companies and the marketing departments, the message banks and the receptionists were a room full of Australian beer Illuminati; A heap of professional brewing blokes that don’t answer their phones unless they know who’s calling. A steadily reinforced line of Lion Nathan brewers sit on one wing of tables sticking very close together, a few scruffy micro-brewers in patches and then a handful of Coopers brewers, the head judge being Simon Fahey from Coopers in the middle, looking like a greying clean shaven Jesus in the middle of the last supper. I’m sitting nervously right next to Simon, under his wing as an associate judge as the calibration session starts. I know the Lion Nathan guys will be dark horses because I don’t get access to these blokes at all as small time media, so meeting them as a judge will be interesting. I’m standing out like a goth teen at a B&S ball and apart from a handful of people in the room I know well, there’s a heap of people in the room wondering who the hell I am and why the hell I’m there. They seem very relieved when I pick up on some DMS in a lager during the calibration session and nod approvingly, making darting looks for other nods, then bigger nodding before putting noses back into the glasses in unison. These guys are amazing. The attention and detail in the light lager and lager classes are impressive to say the least, seeing how they’re such incredibly hard classes to judge. The Lion Nathan guys brew most of it on the local market and it’s a bloody hard style to do well so they know where every fault is. At the end of those classes I have a headache and mentally exhausted. I feel like I’ve been trying to communicate telepathically with what seems like a hundred XL5 tasting glasses, each containing a splash of almost identical, restrained beer in each. It’s like trying to smell where a fly is in the room.
As a head judge, Simon Fahey from Coopers is polite, keen on a quick laugh, but ready to get down to business with a good degree of control. He’s a funny guy whom I’ve seen speak before in other official Coopers events but he knows his stuff without being a tosser. There’s no conferring in proper judging, but he’d check on my scoring once or twice during the day and give me a reassuring nod sometimes, letting me know how close I was to his final score on the last beer of a bracket. It was a relief. Previously I had a picture in my mind of someone out the back methodically dropping each of my score sheets into a shredder along with my invite for next year.
Then comes the media session. As soon as the TV crew’s bright lights turned on some of the big brewers retreat like vampires avoiding the sunshine, so the presenter collars Simon Sellick from BrewBoys. Simon’s one of the funniest blokes I’ve ever met and I was expecting an excellent interview from one of the smaller brewers. It turns out that he’s made on the best ales of the year that was in the final taste off. Instead the TV station cuts; a grunt, a serious face and a vowel from Simon Sellick into the interview and the presenter makes a joke about getting pissed and catching a cab at the end. We we’re all hoping the media attention would help the cause and get the beer show off the ground. The last thing we’d want to do is look like a bunch of pissed idiots. I see it on the tiny square TV screen in dad’s little hospital room later that evening and it barely shows more than the side of my arm in a shot so I’m relieved. On the wide screen at home that night I was right smack bang in the background laughing like a doofus at Simon Sellick’s jokes with a glass of beer in my hand… looking like a pissed idiot.
