Frothy test of the best

Ishan Grover, the Founder and CEO, Svish, gives an interesting overview of Spiritz Selection Blind Testing of beers, which he did conduct in this year’s edition of the competition.

I knew that when Spiritz’s Editors decided to judge beers only for the second time in the distinguished history of Spiritz Selection Awards, it had to be different from myriad award ceremonies. I was extremely honoured when I was given the opportunity to conduct the competition along with an esteemed panel.

Despite the lingering shadow of pandemic hovering over us, SSBT of beers didn’t lack any froth of enthusiasm from the participants. Despite the threats of Covid still looming, there were a good number of jury and there was no dearth of spirit among them. Spiritz team selected jury members on the basis of their experience in brewing and understanding of different styles of beers.

The blind tasting was held at Radisson Blu Plaza Mahipalpur, New Delhi with an array of precautionary measures in place which included temperature checks, sanitising stations and adequate social distancing. Both the Spiritz team and the hotel staff worked in unison, which immensely contributed to the success of the show.

Exhaustive Selection Process

Entries were segmented across three categories – Witbier, Lager below 5 percent ABV and Lager above 5 percent ABV, with each of these categories having style guidelines for the competition. Each of the style guidelines had in turn several parameters such as Appearance, Carbonation, Aroma, Mouth feel and Taste on which the beers in the competition were evaluated upon.

The exhaustive selection process was geared to select the best among the best among the beer players participating in the prestigious competition. Elegant simplicity of the process and stringency towards quality amalgamated beautifully to create a memorable competition that kept our spirits high.

In most beer competitions, medals are given to individual beers in various categories on the basis of blind tasting. This is done primarily for the reason to avoid prejudice. But we didn’t stop at planning it as just a blind tasting. We went a bit further ahead and segregated the tasting judgment across multiple stages.

New Element in the Competition

There has been a significant change in this year’s edition of the award. Unlike the previous edition not only the top scoring beers were awarded with the Gold, Silver and Bronze medals but in this award section a datum was set, above which beers falling between a particular range of scores were awarded medals applicable to that range.

It entailed that there was no bar on the number of medals to be awarded provided a beer came under a particular range of scores. But it also meant that a beer with scores below the minimum benchmark failed to qualify for any award.

Overall, the blind tasting of beers revealed to us that beer with its apparent deceptive simplicity comes across as a challenging beverage to judge dispassionately, but at the same time the beer judging process can be as much fun as drinking of this golden coloured frothy beverage. Now let us just flip the page to meet the winner beers ... and also let us raise our glasses to say “Cheers” to them.