By Bruce Buerger, BJCP Director of Education and Training
The Education and Training Directorate is very happy to announce the release of the Malt Sensory Training exercise. This exercise can be used for self-study or in a group setting. It is aimed at highlighting the flavors and aromas of malt while improving judge perception and description skills.
To assist in this exercise the Education and Training Directorate created the Malt Sensory Training Wheel, a training device that contains common malt descriptors and can be used to associate terms and levels to sensory experiences.
The objectives of the exercise are to allow participants to experience the aromas and flavors that different malts can offer to beer, help new and existing judges to develop their descriptive vocabulary, and help new and existing judges to describe the levels of intensity of aromas and flavors.
Conducting the exercise is fairly simple and pretty straight forward. First prepare the malt tea using the direction outlined in the training, sample the tea’s aroma and flavor, and then make marks on the wheel under the appropriate descriptor. For stronger experiences make the mark closer to the outside of the wheel under the descriptor, for lower sensations mark closer to the inside of the wheel.
One of the common issues judges have is finding the words to describe what they are experiencing. Very often they start out using terms such as sweet or malty and have troubles identifying secondary or tertiary characteristics. This exercise can help newer, recognized, and certified ranked judges improve their descriptive and perception scores on the BJCP Judging Exam. It can also help out brewers who wish to gain a better understanding of different malts.
Stay tuned for news about a virtual overview of the training in July as well as additional information regarding the Hop Sensory Training exercise and Hop Sensory Training Wheel which is currently under development. Until then we encourage members to give the exercise a try and please feel free to direct questions to education_director@bjcp.org.