Bariloche

At the National Homebrewers Conference this year, I attended a presentation by Dr. Diego Libkind (who called in via Skype) on the Patagonian origins of European lager yeast.  He threw up a gorgeous photo of his hometown - Bariloche, Argentina - and mentioned they had several craft breweries.  I was sold!

View from the hostel patio

Not a stock photo - I actually took this a few kilometres from downtown!

Aside from gorgeous mountains, lakes, skiing and hiking, chocolate and ice cream, there were in fact several craft breweries in town, and Dr. Libkind was nice enough to suggest a few for Mrs. Hoplog and I to try.

Bachmann

First up was Bachmann, a small operation in a cute house.

Tasters were available, and revealed that their schwarzbier was well worth another taste.  All beers were low in alcohol and bitterness, and nicely brewed.

My name is Chad, and I approve of this beer

Antares

Next up was Antares, a bigger brewpub with several locations, who also sells their beer in bottles.

The interior was certainly full-on craft beer bar, and it was busy.

The beer selection was excellent, though the quality was a bit lacking compared to Bachmann.  Only one beer was what I'd call bad, but none of them were "great."  (A lot of forgettable recipes and low-level flaws.)  Still, it was a well organized operation that is clearly seeing a lot of success.  Some higher-alcohol beers were present, but no hoppy/bitter beers (except the barleywine).

Nice range of beers, but I'm trying hard to forget that Octoberfest seasonal at the bottom right, ouch

Manush

We had to wait until Tuesday for Manush to open, but it was worth wait.  Very cozy, some nice beers, great food, and truly outstanding service.  A must-visit for a meal in Bariloche.

Happy Hour - 6 until 7 or 8 in Argentina - means 2 for 1 beers, but per person, no sharing!

A pretty nice little milk stout at Manush.  The Kolsch and Pale Ale were quite passable too

A couple of preliminary observations on Argentinian craft beer:

• Cerveza artesenal exists in Argentina, and the movement seems to be progressing nicely.
• My perception is that smaller craft breweries have difficulty controlling fermentation temperatures.  Perhaps large-scale refrigeration and/or heating is an expense they can't bear.  Anyway, many beers are a bit fruitier and "warmer" than usual, and some struggling yeast flavour is common.
• Craft beer is subtle here - brewers aren't cranking out hop bombs and huge imperial stouts.  I would guess this is similar to a decade ago in BC, when beer consumers' palettes were still used to macro lager and were not ready for bigger, full-flavour beers.  So don't expect it to taste like Portland, OR here.  At least not yet.
• If you have allergies, note that most craft beer bars provide all tables with a free snack of peanuts.

More Bariloche brewpubs still to come.

Mendoza

Next stop on the tour was Mendoza, Argentina (via a spectacular bus ride through the Andes from Santiago).  Not a ton going on here beer-wise (other than a brewpub beer garden that we didn't have time for, next to the Maipu wineries).  However, Mendoza is Argentina's premiere wine-growing region, so when in Rome...

Tasters at Tempus Alba

View from your bike while riding between wineries in Maipu.  That's Mt. Aconcagua in the background, the highest peak outside of the Himalayas.

Glass floor for viewing the barrel room from the (swanky) tasting room at Trapiche, Argentina's largest winery

Argentina also means asado!  Traditional Argentine meat grilling.

Our only beer experience of note was to sample one of the two national-brand macro beers with our pizza: Andes (the other is Quilmes).  Next to a can I once left in the freezer overnight, this was the coldest beer I've ever had.  The beer in the bottle was not frozen, not even once the cap was removed.  But as soon as I poured it into the (non-frozen) glass, it developed a slush on top.  I'm thinking that maybe the CO2 released while pouring brought enough carbonate out of solution to raise the freezing temperature of the beer just enough for ice to form.

Beer slush, anyone?

Storing bottles of this style/brand of beer below freezing is probably not the end of the world.  But all the beer and pop are kept in the same fridge/freezer down here, along with most of the beer glasses.  I see a lot of very foamy, very over-chilled beer in my near future!

First Beers in the Southern Hemisphere

What's the first thing I see in the beer section of a grocery store upon arriving in Santiago?

Well, that was unexpected.  I wonder if it's Duff, Duff Dry or Duff Light?

It was quite warm out, so to start I bought a couple of the big-name Argentinian macro lagers, and a Santiago-made craft beer.

If it's hot and you need a cheap beer, you could do worse than a 1 L Cristal beer.  I'm sure this is what the ganstas drink in Argentina.

Pouring out the Argentinian Cristal would have been a lot cheaper...

The other big brand is Escudo.  Initial sips were a bit better, but it goes downhill quickly upon exposure to the atmosphere, so it's Cristal by a nose.

Beer choice seems less important when travelling and faced with a sunny patio

Szot is craft beer made on the outskirts of Santiago - I bought an Amber.  Fives times the cost of Cristal.  It was bottle conditioned, but had far too much brown yeast at the bottom of the bottle.  Tasting confirmed that there were fermentation issues and/or premature bottling - unfortunately it was kind of a sour mess.

Good try Szot, but this bottle was not drinkable

We were thinking of visiting a brewery - despite having a nice-looking facility, Szot was a long/complicated mini-bus ride SW of the center of Santiago, and didn't seem worth the effort given the bottle we had purchased.  Handwerk Brewers (makers of Rothhammer craft beer) were beyond the reach of normal transit to the NW, and we weren't even sure if they were open to the public.  However, just down the street was a craft beer pub that featured Rothhammer beer!

Rothmann beers at Cerveceria Nacional

So of course we had to try all their draft offerings.

Tasters!

In sum, a couple were not good (why do many far-flung craft breweries pass off an unfinished, failed, yeasty, opaque, sour beer as a "special cloudy beer"?), a couple had promise, and - wonder of wonders - their IPA was very tasty!  A real (South) American style IPA.  (Pronounced "EE-pa" down here.)  Mugs of IPA all around!

The interior had all the trappings of a craft beer bar.  Except for the fact that everyone smoked relentlessly so it was a bit difficult to taste your food/beer.

And they served some pretty respectable thin-crust pizza.  The prices were roughly equivalent to what we'd pay back home.

Mrs. Hoplog loving pizza & IPA

We moved on to Valparaiso, Chile, and tried a couple of beers from the local Cervecera del Puerto.  The restaurant we were at had only "light and dark" - which in my limited travels is usually a huge warning flag that the local beer offered is going to be bad.

Fortunately, it wasn't bad.  The "light" wasn't great, but the "dark" was quite interesting.  The malt/hop bill was almost identical to a Belgian Dubbel, but it probably used a more standard (non-Belgian) fruity ale yeast.  Actually pretty good!

"Light" and "Dark" (not the real names, just what we were told) from Cervecera del Puerto

Standard serving practices in Chile seem to be icy (literally) beer, frozen glasses, and lots of overflow/excessive foam.  I'll hold off commenting for now.

Hey, why is the drip tray getting all the beer?

So far Chile does appear to have some craft beer, though it's a bit hard to find and the quality seems highly variable.

2012 BC Beer Awards Judging, and Judging To Style

A few photos of the BC Beer Awards judging that took place in late September at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts by Granville Island.  A great venue for another long but satisfying day judging beer.

Heads down judging

A mini-best-of-show to determine a category winner

Happy judges!

Some of the samples for a mini-BOS

Judging To Style Guidelines and Judging Commercial Beer

The primary purpose of judging beer within the BJCP rules is to help homebrewers make better beer.  Experienced judges can identify flaws or inadequacies in the brewing process, or in a recipe, or in handling/storing a beer, and advice is given accordingly.  Awards are mostly for bragging rights & prizes of free equipment or ingredients.  Homebrewers put a lot of time and effort into their beer, paying an entrance fee and carefully shipping their beer to a competition - so we judges need to provide the best advice we can via our evaluation sheets (which are sent back to the brewers after the competition).

Beer is judged according to its intended style, largely out of necessity - you need to know what the brewer was trying to achieve before you can determine if he/she was successful, and you need a uniform method of comparing and ranking similar beers.  The BJCP provides detailed sensory evaluation guidelines for dozens of styles of beer; competition entries are judged to those guidelines.  If you create a unique beer that doesn't fit a usual style, you can enter it into one of the catch-all "specialty" categories.

While there's a subjective element to all beer judging, the BJCP rules are designed to make judging as objective as possible.  Without predefined style guidelines to judge to, the only questions would be "how good is this beer?" (and the answers would be entirely subjective, according to each judge's personal preference), and "which of these 300 wildly different beers is best?" (to which each judge would answer differently, and there would be no clear winners).

Some people (usually beer consumers rather than homebrewers) don't like the idea of judging to predefined styles.  Some perhaps think that certain great beers would "fall between the cracks" style-wise and score poorly as a result.  This isn't necessarily true - some styles in the guidelines are quite broad and encompass many different expressions, while styles with very specific attributes might be narrow.  And there's always the "specialty" judging categories, which are catch-alls for unique beers.  Some people might think that the closer a beer matches the published style guidelines the higher a beer will score, regardless of its overall quality.  This is also not necessarily true.  A beer that is radically off-style with respect to the guidelines can expect a terrible score (e.g. a really great stout is always a really terrible pilsner).  But if a beer is on-style with respect to the published guidelines, and is free from flaws, the score is not determined by the degree to which it matches the guidelines; at this point the score will be related to the overall balance, the sum of the parts, the drinkability and other intangible elements that separate truly world-class beer from only decent beer.

Judging commercial beers is decidedly different than judging homebrew.  In no particular order:

1. It's a given that the vast majority of commercial beers will not have major flaws - and it takes a lot more effort to judge beers that are all pretty good than it does to judge homebrew that varies from bad to excellent.  
2. Commercial breweries brew for profit, not to win competitions - so they don't care about brewing exactly to a set of style guidelines, though they will likely brew beer that their drinkers can recognize with a couple-of-words description (e.g. "Dry Irish Stout" or "Dry-Hopped Saison").  Many commercial beers fall within the guidelines for common styles, while others are best entered in the "specialty" (catch-all) categories. 
3. Commercial breweries enter competitions to win medals that enhance their image & can be used for marketing - and to enter costs them almost nothing in terms of money or effort.  They lob a six-pack of beer at a commercial competition and hope that they get a medal out of it, easy peasy.  If they don't medal, no problem, they're still selling beer.
4. Professional brewers are very sophisticated and generally don't care what a bunch of judges think about their beer; they brew exactly what they want to and need to, and generally do it well.  So the primary "feedback" and "advice" function of judging is not of value to them.  (The BC Beer Awards uses checklist-style judging sheets - these allow faster judging because they eliminate the detailed written feedback that homebrewers expect and professionals don't want/need.) 
5. Beer judges are not saying your favourite commercial beer is inferior just because it didn't win a medal in a competition.  (e.g. Driftwood's Fat Tug IPA is a fantastic IPA, regardless of whether or not it won a medal.)  If a great beer doesn't medal, it probably means competition was stiff.

You can be confident there are solid reasons behind beer judges' evaluations, based on a significant amount of knowledge, experience and judging effort - especially if a judge has a BJCP rank of some sort.  In fact, every judge provides his/her email address on every judging sheet so the brewers may contact the judge if they have any questions about their evaluation - which provides extra incentive to judge accurately and constructively!

I was busy judging beer rather than taking photos, but fortunately @sujindertakeaim tweeted some much snazzier instagram-ed pictures, which I've included below.

Hard at work judging

Entries are organized in another room, out of view of the judges

Best Of Show evaluation - the winners in each style category are compared

Deep thoughts (and arguments) about the Best Of Show contenders