[dc]M[/dc]aybe not 99, but at least a few dozen bottles of beer are along the wall. We take one down, pass it around, make sure the barcode on the bottle matches the form on our computer screens, and pry open the cap.

My judging partner and I each pour a small sample into a plastic cup and hold it to the light. It’s a dark brown, almost black. I bring mine to my nose and smell notes of dark chocolate and roasted coffee. I take a sip and get a pleasant balance between malty sweetness and slight hop bitterness.

Then I go back to the computer screen, my digital notebook, and begin to write.

This is what judging a homebrew competition looks like. There are more than a million amateur brewers nationwide, according to estimates from the American Homebrewers Association, and every month dozens of competitions ask hobbyists like me to submit their beers for feedback and, hopefully, medals and bragging rights.

Behind the scenes, judges carefully taste each beer — the good ones and, yes, the not-so-good ones — to tell brewers how to make an even better batch next time. Last year, I enrolled in a class through the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) with a group of wannabe judges to learn how to fill out a score sheet and properly evaluate any beer.

It’s a lot like reporting. To borrow from the SPJ’s code of ethics, you seek truth with your palate, and you report it on the score sheet.

After more than 10 years brewing beer and nearly a year judging with BJCP, I think every journalist should try reporting and writing like a beer judge. Here’s how:

Descriptive language is accurate language 

You don’t have to be a master brewer to be a successful beer judge. You just need good observational skills, a notebook and the BJCP style guide.

Each beer is judged against a set of standards defined by the BJCP. Want to know what separates an English porter from an American porter? Which kind of hops are most characteristic in a saison rather than an IPA? It’s all in the style guide. Think of it like the AP Stylebook for beer nerds.

[caption id="attachment_170697" align="alignleft" width="450"] Rock of Truth Rye Saison, brewed by Charlie Scudder and named in honor of the Dallas News Guild.[/caption]

When judging a beer, you fill out a scoresheet to rank the beer in five categories — aroma, appearance, flavor, mouthfeel and overall impression — on a scale of one to 50 against the standard described in the BJCP guide. The best beer you’ve ever had could likely score a 45. If a beer is simply undrinkable, it often gets a courtesy score of 13.

The key to filling out a good scoresheet, however, isn’t nailing the numerical value of a beer’s quality. You also have to take detailed notes using descriptive language to tell the brewer what you see, smell, taste and feel.

Sounds easy enough, but when judging a contest with 13 light-bodied Belgian saisons in a row, it can get tricky to describe the subtle differences between one beer and the next. It takes careful observation and creative language, skills that all reporters can learn from.

Say you’re at the bar and you’ve ordered a pint. It arrives and has a thick head of white foam at the top. After a minute or so, that foamy head starts to disappear. What are you left with? Is it completely flat? No, there’s still carbonation there. So how would you describe it?

In BJCP parlance, we sometimes write that “the foamy head fades into a ring of small and medium bubbles.” I often add another line: “A constellation of thin, small bubbles lace the top of the beer.” In beer — as in journalism — details matter. The more descriptive I am about what the beer looks like, the better a brewer can try to dial in the beer’s carbonation and head retention next time.

Try this the next time you’re reporting on an assignment. Take two minutes to describe just one of the five senses you perceive. What do you hear? What do you smell? Even if you don’t use those observations in your final draft, your writing will be better informed by your perceptions.

Pulitzer-winning writer Lane DeGregory does this on every page of her notebook. Every time she turns a new page while reporting, she spends a moment writing down what she observes with each of the five senses. When she’s writing, she can draw from those notes to describe what it felt like to be there – since the reader can’t be.

Descriptive language doesn’t mean adding details that aren’t there, of course. Accuracy in your notes is as important in beer judging as it is in reporting. It is paramount on any judging sheet to be honest and fair with your observations.

But no description at all can be just as inappropriate. Some of the most frustrating score sheets to receive as a homebrewer are the ones that just say, “good beer… nice flavor.” How can a brewer improve if they don’t know what you tasted or smelled or saw in the glass? How can a reader understand a scene if they don’t understand the same?

Using the right puns at the right time

My dad — an award-winning homebrewer turned pro — was recently working at a brewery in Arlington, Texas. Legal Draft Beer Co. — like many great breweries over the past few years — closed its doors in March 2022. The brewery, co-founded by a civil trial lawyer, leaned heavily on a marketing strategy based in legal jargon puns.

Looking for a German-style wheat beer? Theirs was the Hung Jury hefeweizen. Is a wintertime seasonal more your style? That’d be the Legal Holiday winter warmer. How about a black IPA? You’d have to get the Night Court.

To execute these puns, the marketing minds behind the brewery used rhetorical tools that are applicable to any writer.

Take the Hung Jury hefeweizen. You get alliteration between the two H words and a rhythm in those syllables — one, two, four.

Plus, there’s a subconscious meaning behind the name that discerning beer drinkers will notice. A good hefeweizen, brewed with wheat and fermented with a German ale yeast, should be a delicate balance between notes of banana and clove. If you ferment the beer too hot, the yeast puts off extra banana flavors. Ferment too cold, you get too much clove.

Legal Draft’s hefeweizen, then, is a toss-up. It’s caught between the two, just like a good hefe should be. It’s a hung jury. The pun works even if you don’t know how a hefeweizen is made, but it’s even more effective if you do.

If Legal Draft put out a stout called “moot,” for example, it would send the wrong message. Too unimportant, too inconsequential for a strong, dark, malty beer. Instead, their stout was called Chief Justice, a stoic name that brings ideas of importance. (If you brought young children to the brewery, however, they’d get an aptly named Moot Beer.)

The lesson for writers: Use puns when appropriate. But know when and how to make them effective, and never use a pun that sends readers in the opposite direction of the tone you’re trying to convey.

Nut graphs are your story’s tasting notes

Earlier this year, I attended the nation’s largest single-site homebrew competition as a competitor and judge. Over 12,000 entries were submitted to the Bluebonnet Brew-Off by 266 hobbyist brewers. It is notoriously among the most competitive competitions in American homebrewing.

After spending several Saturdays in February judging beers, the competition culminates in a two-day conference in Irving, Texas. Hundreds of brewers gather to sample each other’s recipes, collect awards and share advice on all things beer.

[caption id="attachment_170698" align="alignleft" width="500"] Charlie Scudder sampling craft beer in a Dallas-area brewery.[/caption]

I was pouring for my homebrew club’s bar. We’re the Horsemen of the Hopocalypse, and we were pleased to win the people’s choice award that night for best club bar. We had a wide range of beers on tap, from my dark pecan porter to a light German pilsner to a sweet blueberry-and-vanilla mead. So many choices, and one question from everyone who came up to our bar: “What’s good?”

What any good bartender knows, which is also what every good salesperson knows, is how to quickly and concisely share what the product is and why you should buy it, or in this case, drink it.

It’s like writing a great nut graph, but for your beer.

Like any reporter, I start with my notes. In this case, that means going back to the BJCP score sheet. I’ve already collected detailed descriptive language about how the beer looks, smells and tastes. Now, I condense that into a few short sentences to capture a reader’s (drinker’s) attention and leave them wanting to read (drink) more.

Not long ago, I tried this with one of my favorite North Texas beers. Fire Ant Funeral (another beer with a great name) is an American amber ale made by the Texas Ale Project in Dallas. I didn’t score the beer like I would with a BJCP contest, but I did take brief notes on the appearance, aroma, flavor, mouthfeel and overall impression:

Amber malty sweet, low/moderate earthy hop aroma. Bready malt character. Medium hop bitterness on front of the tongue. Lingering hop character – without a bitter hop bite.

I then worked those notes into a “nut graph” of tasting notes, with a little additional reporting from the brewery’s website:

Unlike its devilish namesake, you'll want to get stung by this flagship amber ale. Its sweet body is balanced with plenty of hop flavor and a crisp finish — without the bite. Seven different varieties of malt and American-grown hops turn this funeral into something to celebrate.

Observing the details

Whenever I’m reading a great piece of journalism or nonfiction, I’m always thinking to myself, How the heck did they pull that off? I wonder what questions, techniques, documents, sources or observations the writer had in their notebook. I think through how they may have used those notes to make the final story work on the page.

I now think about beer the same way. If I taste a great beer with unexpected flavors and characteristics, I want to know how the brewer pulled it off. By dissecting the beer with careful observation, an experienced beer judge can start to realize how the recipe came together. It makes me a better beer judge and a better brewer in the process.

Apply the same technique to your reading and writing. It’ll make you a better reporter and will make your stories stand out every time.

***

Charlie Scudder is a freelance writer and editor in Arlington, Texas, and an adjunct professor at the Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas. He has brewed beer for more than 10 years and is a BJCP provisional beer judge.

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The final session of the 2015 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference served as a preview of next year’s theme.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prizes, the conference will focus on the awards and award-winners. Sunday’s final session featured The Dallas Morning News editorial page editor and Pulitzer Board member Keven Ann Willey, Washington Post managing editor Kevin Merida, Los Angeles Times reporter and Pulitzer-winner Ruben Vives and Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer-winner Carol Leonning.

The group talked about what it takes to win the prize and the effect of winning it on their work and their sources. Vives said that he’s still early in his career and hopes winning the award – for the Times’ Homicide Report – will lead to more big stories.

“The impact, the ripple effect, for our reputation is just astonishing,” Vives said. “People come to me. They trust me.”

Leonning said her sources in the Secret Service were just as thrilled about the award. They had wanted the story told for a long time, and “really believed President Obama was going to get killed.”

While she was still working on a story about a 2011 assassination attempt, a man jumped the White House fence, forcing her to publish her narrative project quickly and work with those same sources on deadline. She said if she hadn’t built those sources early, they wouldn’t have come to her during breaking news.

“It was so great luck, I had sources when I needed them,” Leonning said. “I know they were delighted to be heard.”

Merida and Willey talked about the behind-the-scenes process that happens between publication and the prize. Merida said his staff has a de-facto “contest wrangler” who goes through each department to find entry-worthy work. Editors debate which three pieces to enter in each contest.

The entries then go to the various juries for each category, which select the three finalists sent to the Pulitzer Board for final judging.

“It’s great to win the prize because it’s energizing to the newsroom,” Merida said. “It inspires people. It motivates them.”

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George Getschow, the tribal leader and founder of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, opened Sunday’s sessions by taking attendees to the Fulton Fish Market in New York, the Los Angeles County Courthouse and the Rio Grande in south Texas. Landscape and setting can play just as an important part in stories as the characters and actions, Getschow said. He pointed to examples from Melville, Steinbeck and a handful of journalists to show how great writers craft scenery. “Landscape and place are inextricably bound up with their characters,” Getschow said.

One of Getschow’s examples was Dan Barry’s 2005 story in The New York Times about the end of the Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan:

It smells of truck exhaust and fish guts. Of glistening skipjacks and smoldering cigarettes; fluke, salmon and Joe Tuna's cigar. Of Canada, Florida, and the squid-ink East River. Of funny fish-talk riffs that end with profanities spat onto the mucky pavement, there to mix with coffee spills, beer blessings, and the flowing melt of sea-scented ice.

This fragrance of fish and man pinpoints one place in the New York vastness: a small stretch of South Street where peddlers have sung the song of the catch since at least 1831, while all around them, change. They were hawking fish here when an ale house called McSorley's opened up; when a presidential aspirant named Lincoln spoke at Cooper Union; when the building of a bridge to Brooklyn ruined their upriver view.

Take it in now, if you wish, if you dare, because the rains will come to rinse this distinct aroma from the city air. Some Friday soon, perhaps next month, the fish sellers will spill their ice and shutter their stalls, pack their grappling hooks and raise a final toast beneath the ba-rump and hum of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive.

Getschow offered this checklist for developing landscape as a character:

• What is the history of the place, and how does it affect the place today?
• What is the economy of the place? How does money, or lack thereof, impact characters?
• What do people wear in the place?
• What do people eat in the place?
• How do people speak to each other in the place?
• What is the weather like?
• What’s the religious landscape like? What do people believe?
• What are the gestures people use? How do people greet each other?
• Are people in the place superstitious? What superstitions do they believe?
• What sensory details can you use to describe the place? What does it look like, what does it sound like, what does it smell like?

“Suddenly, the place becomes a character. A living, breathing character,” Getschow said. “That’s what we do as storytellers, we want them to experience what we’ve experienced.”

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[dc small]D[/dc]an Barry said a 90-word wire report from rural Iowa was the spark of what became his 2014 story “The ‘Boys’ in the Bunkhouse.’”

Thirty men with intellectual disabilities in a schoolhouse on a hilltop being paid $65 each month to kill turkeys for 35 years.

“That series of images jumped out at me,” Barry said. “I think in terms of cinema. I think in terms of scenery.”

The Pulitzer-winning writer of the This Land column in The New York Times spoke Saturday at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference with fellow Times staffer Kassie Bracken. Bracken is a videographer who has collaborated with Barry on many of his reports.

The two presented a series of case studies and video examples about how visual journalism – specifically video – can help improve narrative writing.

“I learned long ago not to say, ‘This is my photographer,’” Barry said. “The way to do it is respect the discipline … but respect the power of those disciplines to dramatically raise the game.”

When on assignment, Barry and Bracken will many times negotiate with each other how to structure interviews and reporting days. If they split up during the day, Barry said they meet in the evenings and debrief each other, so both reporters stay on top of a story as it develops.

“I’m looking for different things than Dan is,” Bracken said. “As a video person you’re not a gatherer, you’re a hunter.”

Barry and Bracken said they both approach sources without notebook or camera when beginning their reporting. They’ll visit a source many times to earn trust and make sure the subject is comfortable with the scrutiny of a reporter.

Bracken said she specifically makes sure that sources know what they’re getting into before they begin shooting. She’ll tell a potential subject what she plans to shoot, how much time it will take and why she wants to get the shots she works for.

“You gain trust by just being there. Not imposing yourself, but being available. You have to spend the time,” Barry said. “Then the notebook comes out and the stories come to you.”

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[dc small]I[/dc]n a room full of writers, Caleb Hannan was remarkably honest and candid about his mistakes.

At the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, Hannan discussed his 2014 Grantland story that sparked national controversy and discussion about transgender portrayal in the media. In a session about mistakes ranging from Stephen Glass to Rolling Stone, Hannan’s story dominated the conversation.

Other panelists were S.I. Rosenbaum, senior editor at Boston Magazine and one of the most vocal critics of Hannan’s story, and Slate’s Hanna Rosin, who worked alongside Glass at The New Republic and interviewed the writer of a recently discredited story in Rolling Stone about a gang rape.

Reporting for Grantland, Hannan researched the creator of a supposedly scientifically superior putter — a woman who went by Dr. V. In the eight months of reporting, he found out that she had lied about her academic resume and was transgender.

In October 2013, Dr. V took her own life. The story ran the next January.

“Did you have a sense she was unstable?” Rosenbaum asked Hannan on Saturday.

“Yes,” he said.

Hannan said he and his wife had multiple conversations about V’s instability. They had a friend of the family who took their own life earlier that year, yet at every chance to drop the story, Hannan felt — at the time — justified in his reporting.

“My wife brought it up whenever she could,” he said. “There’s a momentum to a story that’s hard to stop.”

He also said he regretted that he and Grantland editors didn’t take the time to restructure the story after Dr. V’s suicide. He filed his first draft months before, and never altered the basic outline.

There were many times when Hannan had concerns, he said. When a freelance fact-checker was worried Dr. V may hurt herself, Hannan said he was “scared shitless,” but that he and his editors were “lulled into a sense of, this is a con-artist first and a transgender woman second.”

“The bones of that draft barely changed. That narrative draft barely changed,” Hannan said. “Everybody in this room has had the feeling of just, ‘get this out,’ which is the last feeling you should have.”

Rosenbaum re-edited the story after the controversy started, a version which avoided the fact that Dr. V was transgender. Rosenbaum said it was partially the fault of editors who didn’t have the right kind of experience to properly address trans issues.

“I felt sick. I felt my stomach turn over,” Rosenbaum said. “It felt like a horror novel.”

At the time, Hannan felt like his aggressiveness was simply doing his job, but now questions if Grantland was the best place for the story – and if it should have existed in the first place.

“Are they the people equipped to deal with this emotionally? Am I?” Hannan said. “There’s a momentum to a story that’s hard to stop.”

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