But I found a couple of things interesting in this story "Here are the winners of the 2022 B.C. Beer Awards".
1) I think the number of entries is pretty decent. The article says they received entries from "120 of the province's 220-plus breweries". Entries per category:
minimum: 9 (Belgian Strong Ale)
maximum: 99 (Hazy IPA)
average: 32
2) Diversity, inclusion etc. Quotes from the article include "record number of 10 female judges" and "a predominantly female-identifying security team told to exercise a zero-tolerance approach toward harassment". Good stuff to be sure, although I would expect any bad apples exhibiting bad behaviour towards others would more likely occur in the workplace than at a public event.
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seangm wrote: ↑Mon Dec 13, 2021 10:38 am I tend to wonder how relevant these sorts of competitions are these days, especially with many breweries not entering and the sheer volume of beer that is released.
With the democratization of information and opinions it seems that the formal critical role is increasingly replaced with community sourced recommendations and feedback. I've seen it in with things like music and film as well; people (especially younger people nowadays) are more likely to eschew the opinions of traditional critics for the more crowdsourced opinions of social media. From what I can discern it comes as a sort of backlash to what can feel at times like the gatekeeping or pretense of the traditional critical role.
Personally I've valued critical opinions since they are typically represent knowledgeable people who are well trained in their field, but at the same time for many categories I could list a far superior beer to any of these winners (Godspeed for instance would dominate all the lagers in my books). This of course is largely a result of a limited pool of breweries entering in the first place, but I'm curious if people place much weight on things like this nowadays.
Cass wrote: ↑Mon Dec 13, 2021 11:25 am I'm sure there are many breweries out there, especially ones that don't get the kind of social media & writer love as others do, which still believe awards shows are a way to break through. As long as those breweries exist, awards shows will still continue as they'll pay for their entries. And then when breweries win and promote it on their social channels, they give credibility to the shows even if beer people know the shows don't represent "the best". And then writers/beer personalities who get asked to judge or host post about it as well, which further fuels credibility even though they are often the ones most skeptical about the completeness of awards shows. It's kind of a funny cycle.