I hate to start my update with bad news however I am sad to report the passing of Charlie Gow. You may have worked with him as an Associate Exam Director or simply shared a beer with him at a conference or a contest. Please keep him and his family in your thoughts and prayers.

I want to thank you for your support and doing your part in furthering the explosive growth of homebrewing in the USA. The BJCP just welcomed its 8000th judge. That is twice as many judges as there were in 2006. That is roughly as many judges in the last 8 years as in the first 21 years. If you have any ideas of what we should do for the BJCP’s 30th anniversary in 2015 please let me know.

There are many new things you need to be aware of and it all starts with the www.bjcp.org website. The website is going to change for the better, be more functional and migrate to a new server. You will still enter the same way however we are striving to make the content better and easier to access. We are working on FAQs that will be on the front end of the site and direct you to where you want to go. For example one area we spend a lot of time as reps handling is helping people fix point issues and reactivating inactive judges who have lapsed. The place to fix a point issue always starts with the organizer report as the person who files it (not always the contest organizer) can explain why points were awarded a certain way and fix a clerical error that kept points from making it to your record. If all goes well in the future rather than having the contests simply dropping off the computer schedule, the email of the person filing the report will be linked to past contests allowing direct communication between volunteers and the person filing the report without going through several intermediaries.

On that note organizers please try to ensure people who don’t have BJCP numbers are included on your report and check the spelling of their name closely. That makes everyone’s job a lot easier when trying to claim retroactive points.

There were valid complaints that it was difficult to find a site offering a written exam for those who wanted to take the essay. The Exam Directors came up with a regional written exam model that will be friendly to the graders as well as offer the opportunity to take the written exam in more locations. As the name implies, once a quarter the exam will be offered on the same day. Check the website for the details however the minimum number of examinees requirement does not apply. We will continue to work on offering more tasting exams. We are still limited by the number of grading volunteers. If you are interested we will be more than happy to welcome you.

Finally the new BJCP Guidelines are posted but not yet active. As always a contest may use whatever guidelines they choose however we will encourage everyone to embrace the new guidelines once they are finalized.

As always it is great to get out to contests and meet the judges. If you have questions I would be happy to answer them. Please contact me at south_rep@bjcp.org.

Cheers,

Phil Farrell