What this is, and is not

What it covers, and what it leaves out

Beer, and the two exams that lead to the Certified rank: the online Entrance Exam and the tasting Judging Exam. That is the whole of it.

Mead and cider have their own BJCP judge programmes, each with its own entrance and judging exams, and are not covered here. Beer and food pairing is not on any BJCP beer exam and is not taught. The third beer exam, the Written Proficiency Exam that leads to National and Master, is described for enrolled learners but not trained for.

The BJCP's material, and how it is used here

The BJCP Style Guidelines are Copyright, Beer Judge Certification Program, Inc. Each style page carries the club's own way in, a snapshot, the judging approach and the confusable neighbours, and then the BJCP's 2021 entry for that style, reproduced with attribution for judge training and readable only by people registered here. The entry says which version it is. The current version of the guidelines is always the one at www.bjcp.org, and every entry links to it.

The same applies to the exam. The BJCP question pool is copyrighted, and none of it appears here. The 180 practice questions are original, written for this programme, covering the same subject areas and question formats. For the genuine exam format, use the free official practice exam on the BJCP exam portal.

BJCP style guidelines · BJCP exam program · BJCP study guides · The full reading list

What we store about you, and who can see it

Your progress is held against your account, so it follows you between devices and survives a cleared browser. That is a change from the first version of this app, which kept everything in the browser only and lost it if you switched phones.

Stored: which units you have marked done, your self-check answers and marks and the descriptions you write on style cards (in your own words, so a facilitator can read them and comment), your style review schedule, the summary of each practice set (score, percentage, and which subjects came up weak), and each scoresheet drill's score, variance and timing. Also your registration answers, session bookings, and any facilitator sign-off.

Not stored: your written tasting notes in the scoresheet drill, and your individual answers to practice questions. The drill keeps the numbers, not the words, and the question bank keeps a total, not a transcript.

Who can see it: you, and the club people who run the course. A facilitator can see your registration and BJCP ID, your session bookings and attendance, the modules signed off and any note left with a sign-off, which units you have marked done, your self-check answers and the descriptions you write on style cards (judging is a describing skill, and that is where they can help), and the numbers from your scoresheet drills (the style, your total, the panel's total and the variance when there was one, which sections you left blank, and the time), never the words. A club admin can also see your email address, and decides exam candidacy. Nobody but you sees your practice-set scores or your review decks. There is no leaderboard and no analytics.

Your account is the same one as Valley Brewer: one identity, one email. You do not need to be a club member to register here, and registering here does not change anything about your club membership.

Want a copy of your record, or want it deleted? Ask a club admin. Under the Privacy Act 2020 you can see what is held about you and ask for it to be corrected.

Clears the local cache only. Your progress stays on your account.

How it was made

The units and style entries are generated from the programme's Word workbooks, which are the authored source of truth, so the web app and the printed editions cannot drift apart. AI tooling was used in producing and structuring this material. It is unverified draft content requiring human review, and it does not carry the authority of the BJCP or of any individual judge's experience.

Offline

The learner pages work offline once you have visited them: study on the bus, or in a hall with no wifi. The facilitator pages are deliberately excluded from the offline cache, because they carry the answer key.