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Cider Digest #1102
From: cider-request@talisman.com
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Subject: Cider Digest #1102, 28 December 2003
Cider Digest #1102 28 December 2003
Forum for Discussion of Cider Issues
Dick Dunn, Digest Janitor
Contents:
Re: BJCP and cider judging ("Bill Slack")
cider styles and NY Times tasting (Benjamin Watson)
RE: BJCP bashing ("Brian Lundeen")
Re: BJCP competitions (Terence Bradshaw)
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Subject: Re: BJCP and cider judging
From: "Bill Slack" <wrs@slack.org>
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 16:38:34 -0500
First, let me introduce myself and my background. I have lurked on this
list a long time, even back when Jay ran it, but don't think I've ever
posted. I have made beer, mead and cider (I even made scrumpy once with raw
meat) since 1986. I have been a beer judge most of that time and have
judged at over 100 competitions. I judge ciders and meads as well, and am
usually assigned to those categories by the competition organisers in the
Northeast where I do most of my judging. A significant number of BJCP
judges in the northeast who judge cider or mead learned to do so either
from me or from someone who learned from me. I judged at the AHA cider
nationals, including BOS, for eight years in a row. I have been elected by
the judges in my region to the Board of Directors of the BJCP three times
and I am currently serving out my sixth year in that position. I served as
President of the BJCP until I resigned from that post recently after five
years in that ofice. I have made several hundred gallons of cider and I
always do a batch or two every year. More to the point, I am also the
author of the current cider section of the BJCP style guidelines.
I feel I must explain a few things. First of all, the BJCP assuredly does
not, nor did it ever, think cider or mead were varieties of beer. Our
motivation to include them was to provide a disciplined and consistent way
to evaluate these homemade products. No one else was doing it and we
stepped into the gap. We also considered doing the same for homebrewed sake
but that activity has not yet reached the critical mass needed to make it
worth doing. But I assure you, we consider mead, cider, sake, wine, etc. to
all be legitimate beverages in their own right and they are certainly not
beer. BTW, we occasionally think about applying our disciplines to the
sensory evaluation of wine, but there is already a huge body of people doing
that and we probably wouldn't be welcome.
As to the current guidelines: We certainly know that there are more than
three categories of cider. When the BJCP style guidelines were being
reviewed and rewritten a few years ago, I was asked to rewrite the cider
section. Previously, they were essentially the old AHA guidelines written
by Paul Correnty (who taught me most of what I know about apples and cider).
It was obvious that a complete taxonomy of cider and perry styles, while
hugely desirable from a cider aficionado's point of view, woud simply be too
unwieldy for what people were experiencing in entries in competitions.
Routinely, organizers would have to collapse categories in order to be able
to judge the entries and award prizes. I rewrote the guidelines with the
intent to identify the categories that the entries typically were collapsed
into based on our experince during the past year. Its purpose was to make
the competitions less unwieldy, not to deny the existence of all the worthy
categories of cider and perry, especially those styles from the UK, France
and Northern Spain. I will happilly support a rewrite of these guidelines
if the competition organizers want me to.
I hope this clears things up.
And keep up the good work, this is a great forum.
Bill Slack
Representative for the Northeast Region
Board of Directors
Beer Judge Certification Program, Inc.
------------------------------
Subject: cider styles and NY Times tasting
From: Benjamin Watson <bwatson@monad.net>
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 16:58:11 -0500
Gary Awdey wrote:
> I confess to having ambivalent feelings about cider judging as a part of
> BJCP unless the judging is meant to be personal and outside of what most
> people would consider to be competition. It's great that cider tasting
> events are being promoted. It just bothers me that this is being done under
> the name "beer" and it bothers me that this is being done to a
> "certification" (implying that a high level of competence has been achieved)
> rather than as a process of gradual, enjoyable and ongoing personal
> enlightenment (Or am I alone in thinking this?).
You're not alone by any means, Gary. But with the increasingly high
profile of cider, it's apparent that people are still using either beer
or wine as a point of reference for what they're tasting.
I agree that most cider is more akin to wine, except the industrial or
draft ciders that are made with pasteurized juice (or more commonly
cooked-down concentrate) -- those operations are more akin to brewing,
and perhaps that style of cider is appropriate to include in a beer
tasting. Or, for that matter, the real "draft" ciders of England, which
are casked and contain live yeast. In a sense they are analagous to
real ale.
But ever since Lord Scudamore's time in 17th century England, cider in
bottles has always been more akin to wine, in terms of connoisseurship
as well as production. And although one can apply a lot of taste
descriptors to artisanal cider that would be familiar to a wine
connoisseur, I think that again this is mainly for the sake of
reference when comparing different ciders in a tasting -- it's not to
imply that cider is exactly analagous to wine.
This was brought home to me forcefully today when I read Eric Asimov's
tasting notes ("Ciders of the Times") in Wednesday's NY Times, referred
to in the previous CD edition.
Asimov is an intelligent guy, as are the rest of the tasters, including
my friend Garrett Oliver from Brooklyn Brewery and Slow Food USA. But
their tasting was all over the place -- clearly none of them knew much
about cider. That's not a criticism, really -- they're just at the same
level of knowledge that most of us were at several years ago.
The panel obviously preferred one particular style (Normandy cider),
and the ones they selected are well made and good examples. As to the
rest of the choices . . . they picked Original Sin as the best American
cider? Maybe I've been unfair to these folks, but I don't know who the
hell makes this stuff, and have only been able to buy it on draft at
one pub in New York City. I was supremely underwhelmed by it -- it
seemed very thin and watery, sort of the hard-cider equivalent of
ciderkin.
The panel also liked the Farnum Hill Extra-Dry Still, which I like too
but which is at the other end of the spectrum from French cidre -- it;s
dry and tannic and acidic all at once, and way too austere for most
American drinkers. And it's interesting to note that FH beat out
Woodchuck Dark N'Dry (ugh) and Hornsby's (double ugh) by half a star.
My point is that I think it's unfair to lump all ciders together like
this, regardless of style, simply because there are so few ciders out
there and you can do so. It's as if the Times decided to do a wine
tasting panel comparing together various chardonnays, cabernet
sauvignons, and muscat dessert wines. Lumping all ciders together is
just as senseless.
I'm trying to be charitable and remember that back in 1997 I conducted
my own first blind tasting in this way -- just throwing vastly
different ciders together based on whatever I could find. But I've
learned a few things since then, and maybe the Times will become more
sophisticated too. But it will take people who "get" cider -- like the
folks on this Digest, and the producers themselves -- to keep educating
consumers and food writers alike. We're just at the beginning of
enlightenment, I suspect -- which offers exciting opportunities, but is
also frustrating for us. As if we're standing on a ledge above the
trail, and watching the hikers down below treeline, and yelling "Come
ON! The view up here is great!"
I agree with someone who once said of "competitions" that there is
really no one who is yet qualified to be a cider judge -- the various
individual styles made by cidermakers in the U.S. are just beginning to
reflect a character and a quality that lends itself to comparison
across particular narrow categories. But, please, let's at least agree
to separate draft cider and artisanal cider into two different classes.
They're not produced in the same way, so they shouldn't be lumped
together in a tasting.
It's human nature to try and rank different products against each other
and try to select the "best". But cider is such an idiosyncratic and
personal drink right now, that I'm not sure what we gain by pitting
cideries against each other, even in friendly competition. There are
few standards, and no one truly qualified to judge -- unless the
categories are strictly limited and pre-selected by type. For instance,
you could set up an ice cider tasting, or a pommeau tasting, or a
tasting of West Country ciders or perries -- but to paint with a
broader brush than that strikes me as simply an exercise in futility.
Ben Watson
------------------------------
Subject: RE: BJCP bashing
From: "Brian Lundeen" <blundeen@rrc.mb.ca>
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 16:40:52 -0600
> Subject: Re: Cider Digest #1100, 22 December 2003
> From: "Gary Awdey" <gawdey@att.net>
> Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 13:31:50 -0500
>
> The 25th style of beer is mead. The 26th
> style of beer is cider. (I'm not making this up; See
> http://www.mv.com/ipusers/slack/bjcp/style-index.html).
> Presumably the
> yet-to-be-added 27th style of beer is wine and the 49th will
> be tequila.
>
> I didn't mean to be snippy, but do want to point out the
> absurdity of classifying cider as a type of beer.
>
I'm going to try and keep my tone as friendly as possible, given that your
sarcasm has rather annoyed me. The BJCP is not so ignorant as to consider
cider or mead as types of beers. They are simply offering categories for
ciders and meads to be judged as part of BJCP sanctioned events.
> The other thing that bothers me about this is the risk that a
> relatively active beer group will fill a niche and slow the
> development of an
> independent organization for promotion of cider.
Well guess what, the only thing slowing you and mead lovers down is a
complete lack of action on your parts to develop something comparable. Don't
like ciders being judged by people who have only tasted a handful of
examples? Then create a CJCP (and MJCP) and start holding events that are up
to your standards. Look, we brewers know that we are not mead and cider
experts. Dick has told us so. ;-) But until such time as you want to take
the initiative and create organizations that better meet your needs, why not
try thanking the BJCP for at least offering a place for cider and mead
makers to compete, however flawed they might be. And instead of chastizing
the OP for his original request for commercial examples as being
insufficient, credit him for not just going out and picking up a bottle of
Strongbow, and deciding that was enough for his purposes.
Brian
------------------------------
Subject: Re: BJCP competitions
From: Terence Bradshaw <madshaw@innevi.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 20:38:06 -0500
I can weigh some thoughts in on the competition thing...
I have entered ciders in beer competitions before, and never have scored
well. I have always been put off first by the inclusion of cider as a
category of beer, but more importantly by the three supposed styles of
ciders, most of which seem to be based on sweet six-pack types ("would you
like the 'amber draft' or the 'raspberry' XXXchuck/jack?"). The only true
cider style suggested, in my opinion, is the New England-Style cider, of
which the BJCP folks cannot give a commercial example and therefore cannot
suggest to a judge what it really tastes like. Of course NE cider is only
one small segment of the 'real cider' category (see the discussion from a
couple of months ago), so we can say that most certified judges have not
tasted what we call 'real cider'. Looking at the ciders that usually win
the national competitions, most are made from standard orchard juice
fermented either wild or with champagne yeast and then back-sweetened with
a can of concentrate. Sounds like a Bulmer's product to me. The
suggestion that cider should properly be clear and taste and smell
predominantly of apple also suggests either industrial ciders or extremely
well-made french ciders which have either been filtered of undergone
meticulous methode champenoise.
My point is, these beer guys wouldn't know an authentic cider if it kicked
them in the backside. Interestingly, my highest scoring cider based on the
BJCP sheet (score 33) was the one I was least proud of...very young, not
even fully fermented, bottled and tasted within a week (the comp was very
close by) and therefore tasting of apple juice. The blend was completely
commercial fruit...Empire, Cortland, Haralson, etc., and was tossed
together quickly to make some cider vs. no cider at all. What I consider
to have been my best batch, which was a hearty, tannic, estery cider
tasting little of apples but much of cider scored in the low 20's.
If you would like to look for commercial styles of the cider categories
(back to the original question), I would recommend any ciders from Flag
Hill (Vershire, VT), Farnum Hill (Lebanon NH;
http://www.farnumhillciders.com/), or West County Winery (Colrain, MA;
<http://www.westcountywinery.com/>http<http://www.westcountywinery.com/>://w
ww.westcountywinery.com) . These are only a few outfits here in the northeast.
Just my $0.02
Terry B
>Al Boyce wrote:
>
> >We are preparing for our 2004 BJCP class, and I would like to present some
> >excellent examples of Ciders for evaluation practice. What commercially
> >available examples would you recommend for A) Standard Cider, B) Standard
> >Perry, C) New England-Style Cider, D) Specialty Cider (other fruits or
> >adjuncts) and E) Specialty Perry? Please provide websites and/or phone
> >numbers of the cider makers if you have them.
>........
>From: "Gary Awdey" <gawdey@att.net>
>Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 13:31:50 -0500
>..........I didn't mean to be snippy, but do want to point out the
>absurdity of
>classifying cider as a type of beer. Sure, in places like Ireland cider is
>a popular alternative to beer. However, it's NOT the same. ................
Terence Bradshaw
1189 Wheeler Road
Calais, VT 05648
madshaw@innevi.com
(802)229-2004
The views represented by me are mine and mine only................
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End of Cider Digest #1102
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