I'm working on my beer tasting skills. I taste a lot of beer, and I think I've gotten very good at it. However, I don't feel that I've gotten my tasting skills well-regimented. I'm going to try to improve that by actually completing BJCP Score Sheets for some professional and homebrewed beers. A big part of this is to get myself reporting about beer in a standard way and in a way that is informative at least to me, and I hope to the reader.

The BJCP rates beer in the usual four plus one categories: mouthfeel, appearance, aroma and flavor plus overall impression. I'm going to use their weights of 5, 3, 12, 20 plus 10 for my rating. Points in the first four categories are scored for being stylistically accurate while interesting and good, while points for overall impression are mostly about interesting and good and less about stylistic accuracy.

But there's still a question of what the points mean. The BJCP says that 50-45 points are for outstanding beers, 44-38 for excellent beers, 30-37 for very good beers, 29-21 for good beers and 20-14 for fair beers. What would I mean if I said a beer met those standards:

• Outstanding means mind blowing, a knock-out, if you never stopped experience this beer it would be premature
• Excellent This beer exemplifies the style, and is exciting and good, whether because of the right balance, subtlty, or assertiveness. A beer that shows off the style.
• Very Good Measures up to the better portion of commercial representatives of the style. Does well with the important features of the style without any detracting characteristics.
• Good Meets the style specifications but in pedestrian ways or with flaws that detract from accomplishments. The sort of beer that you would tell your friend "Yeah, that's a beer of style x" if he didn't know any quality representatives.
• Fair A beer with flaws enough that you would deny that it really exemplified anything of the style, or perhaps simply bland and flacid in some or most respects. You wouldn't drink or purchase this beer. May exhibit noticable technical flaws.
• Poor Truly bad.

For appearace, I will score a beer 3 if it is outstanding, excellent, 2 if very good or good, 1 if fair and 0 if poor.
For mouthfeel, I will score a beer 5 is it is outstanding or excellent, 4 if very good, 3 if good, 2 if fair, 1 or 0 if poor. (For a style that has very particular mouthfeel characteristics, I would make 5 only for the outstand, 4 for the excellent, etc.)
For aroma, 12 is outsanding, 11 and 10 are excellent, 9 and 8 very good, 7 and 6 are good, 5 is borderline on fair, 4 and 3 are fair. The rest are poor.
For flavor, 20 and 19 are outstanding, 18, 17, and 16 are Excellent, 15, 14,13 and 12 are very good, 11, 10, and 9 are good, 8, 7, and 6 are fair, the rest are problematic.
I think I will discuss overall impression in another post..