The BJCP (Beer Judge Certification Program), founded in 1985, provides a standards-based organization supplying qualified judges to both amateur and commercial brewing competitions designed to promote the appreciation of beer styles and their accurate production. I certainly support this idea. When someone orders a pale ale, s/he does not want to be served something dark and roasty. However, as with many other ideas, the idea of adherence to style is taken to extremes. Some people focus so much on whether a beer fits a narrow definition that they lose sight of the fact that beer is supposed to be enjoyed. This is where I jump ship. I believe that the true measure of a beer's worth is how much enjoyment people get from it, not whether it fits some narrow definition. Therefore any beer contest worth the effort of having it should be hedonistic.

The BJCP has 34 beer categories and more than 100 sub-categories (you can read the style guidelines here). Even so, it is still very possible to brew a beer that does not fit into any one of them! For example, you could make a German wheat beer with an OG of 1.060; it will be too malty for a weissbier, but not malty enough for a weizenbock. Or you could make a Scottish ale with an OG of 1.065, which would be too thin for a wee heavy but too thick for any of the Scottish sub-categories. Now, there is a catch-all category called Specialty Beer, but beers in that category have to be judged hedonistically because there are no style parameters that they must all match. Well, since the BJCP does recognize the importance of hedonism, why even have a bunch of narrow sub-categories where great beers will be penalized if a judge feels that they fall outside the parameters?

Another big problem with the BJCP styles is overlap. Often times two or more sub-categories are virtually identical. For example, look at American Lager and American Light Lager. Their flavor and aroma descriptions are almost identical. What anal-retentive geek felt the need to create a sub-category that's basically American Lager but just a bit lighter?

Now look at Ordinary Bitter and Best Bitter. The aroma descriptions are nearly identical, and the flavor descriptions are completely identical. Why have two sub-categories? What's the point?

The three Scottish sub-categories are a joke. The aroma, appearance, flavor, mouthfeel, and comments descriptions are all identical, word for word. Why fabricate extra sub-categories whose descriptions are identical?

Then there is the persistent problem of different perceptions among judges. If 3 judges evaluate a beer, you will get 3 different scores. Each has their own opinion of how well a beer represents a particular style. I have helped judge BJCP contests with nationally ranked BJCP judges whose scores on a particular beer would differ by as much as 16 points! Since there is no consistency, who can really say which beer represents a style better than another? In every BJCP contest, judges will alter the scores they initially gave in order to approximate the scores given by the other judges in their flight. With all the training and testing that BJCP judges go through, shouldn't they all come up with the same score? The fact that they don't shows that judging to style is just as subjective as judging hedonistically. Given a choice between the two (style and hedonism), doesn't the latter make more sense?

As you can see, the BJCP is fraught with problems: the categories have some serious gaps and overlaps that for some reason its proponents insist on keeping, and judges' opinions differ so much that often the winner of a category depends as much on who the judges are as it does on how well the beers are crafted. Now, I'm not saying that we should have no style parameters at all. I mean, how do you compare an imperial stout to a gueuze? But we don't need so many damned sub-categories. This is why I devised my own system of 7 general categories. There are no gaps in my system; any beer can fit somewhere. There are a few minor overlaps (for example, a beer can be at the high end of the Session category while at the same time being at the low end of the Hoppy or Malty category), but this ensures that there are no cracks for a beer to slip through.