Tips and Recipies in the quest to brew the perfect beer

BJCP Study Notes: Part 1

Our homebrew club has started another round of study group for the BJCP Exam and I will be taking the test in January. We’re fortunate that the club has a number of judges and has collected quite a bit of study material over the years. If you happen to be studying on your own, or don’t have any other judges in your club – maybe some of this will be helpful.

This is only a loose collection of tips and notes gleaned from our study group. By no means is it a “How to get a master score on your first BJCP exam” guide. As I haven’t actually taken the exam yet – I’m nowhere near qualified to write such a thing.

The group meets every 2 weeks but updates might not be quite that often. The bulk of the meetings will be tasting styles and comparing notes.

For the first meeting, one of our experienced judges sat in to give us a few general tips:

There is already a ton of information – sample scoresheets and study notes – on the BJCP site so be sure to read through all of that.
Start studying well ahead of the exam date. Our group is starting 4 months out – there is a ton of material to cover – over 80 styles.
You get 3 hours to complete the exam. There is a rather lengthy written/essay portion and 4 beers for the tasting portion.
The BJCP Study Guide gives you all of the questions that will appear on the exam. The written part of the exam will be a subset of these questions.
The first 2 sections are fill-in-the-blank and true/false. If you study the material this should be practically free points.
In the remaining essay sections, some some parts of the question are assigned a higher point value than others. If you run low on time don’t waste a bunch of it on the 1 point questions, leaving the 6 point ones blank.
You shouldn’t get a fruit, Belgian specialty or experimental beer on the tasting section – so don’t worry too much about them.
Overall your answers should be extremely descriptive. This is something I’m struggling with currently but I hope will improve with practice. It looks easy when reading samples – but it’s much more difficult when you actually have to put the words to paper.