2014 is an election year for the BJCP. In order to provide BJCP members and voters a better understanding into the platforms and policies of representative candidates, The BJCP Bulletin recently conducted interviews with the candidates. Because BJCP Officers are elected from the BJCP Representatives, the platforms and policies of the candidates will likely impact all program members, not only those who reside in the candidate's geographic region.

The BJCP Bulletin adapted a set of questions from a similar certifying organization (KCBS) for the purposes of the interviews. Each candidate was provided the same standard set of questions and exactly two weeks to provide responses, via email, to the question set. Each candidate was instructed that there was no limitation to their response length, however, all responses had to be received at the end of the two week period. Each candidate was also asked for a picture to accompany their responses.

Below are the responses received by West region representative candidate, Travis Hammond. No alterations were made to either the question set or to the responses as they were received.

1) Please describe the skills you posess (which you believe are stronger than the other candidates) which would make you an asset as a representative and board member in dealing with the challenges facing the BJCP, and give an example of how those skills would serve the BJCP Board of Directors and its membership.

As a Senior Project Manager with Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, I know what it takes to get projects completed successfully. Each of the improvement actions that the BJCP undertakes are projects and should be managed as such with clearly stated objectives, expectations, milestones, and schedules. Understanding that our projects are run by volunteers is important as well.

We cannot undertake every improvement project at once. We need to prioritize based on the positive benefits to the organization versus the amount of time, effort, skills, and money it will take to accomplish. We should go for the highest impact and lowest difficulty activities first and then reprioritize as things get done.

I am always on the lookout for new and energetic members. I like to speak with members to find out what they get out of their membership in the BJCP and what more they would like. If they are willing and able, I will help connect them up with the right folks to channel their energy into the solution. It’s a real win-win situation when this works out.

Too often in the past, our overloaded board members have taken projects on themselves rather than asking for help and coaching others. By incorporating a mix of experienced members with newer (and often highly enthusiastic) members in the leadership of the organization, we can spread the work out amongst more people, accomplish more, and avoid burn out.

I am also comfortable with technology and I think it can help us share our best practices and get more people involved in running our organization. By developing online training modules and videos, we can help steepen the learning curve for new judges, and provide learning opportunities for our experienced judges. By conducting Board and Committee meetings through a service like WebEx, GoToMeeting, or Skype, we can allow more members to participate and understand how our organization works.

2) As a judge, exam grader, steward, or member of a committee, please identify the major BJCP issues concerning one of the areas in which you are involved. Describe the major issue, your strategies to correct or improve the issue, and what you see as the biggest challenge to the success of your plan.

As an exam grader and a National Level judge trying to make it through to Master, I think one of the biggest challenges we face as an organization is the definition of what it really means to be a National and a Master level judge. For years, we have resisted putting out any specific guidance on the body of knowledge and level of competence required to achieve our ranks.

This definition of the various levels would need to be communicated to exam graders through training and coaching. As a grader myself, I can say that there is currently no agreement on what constitutes the various levels, and no coaching to help calibrate graders. Often the only guidance given by graders to examinees is the vague “need for independent thought” or “your answer is just missing something intangible”. This isn’t fair to our members and we owe it to them to provide clear direction on how to advance through our ranks.

We need to do more to relieve the bottlenecks in the exam and grading system.

Judge level-specific exams focused on the expected degree of skill and knowledge are a possible answer. Both the Sommelier and Cicerone programs follow this structure, with the Master level generally being a thorough and grueling experience involving demonstration of skills in a one-on-one exam.

This could be achieved by an exam system like this:

• Online Entrance exam to become a Provisional Judge. 200 questions of T/F, multiple choice beer trivia to require a demonstration of effort from new judges before being granted the opportunity to consume our grader’s time
• Recognized Judge exam consisting of judging two beers with Style Guidelines available and without proctors to demonstrate an entry level judge’s ability to provide a complete scoresheet, use proper vocabulary, and provide constructive feedback. Easy to grade, and can be run concurrently with Certified and National Exams.
• Certified Judge exam consisting of T/F questions about the BJCP Program and judging procedures plus judging 3 beers using Style Guidelines compared against proctors perceptions. This would require half of the grading effort required for the current Beer Judging Exam, provides feedback for judges to continue to grow, and can be run concurrently with Recognized and National exams.
• National Judge exam consisting of two essays to demonstrate process, ingredient, and style knowledge and judging 3 beers without Style Guidelines compared against proctors perceptions.
• Master Judge exam consisting of essays with enough time allowed to demonstrate the required breadth and depth of knowledge, independent thought, and providing demonstrated ability to consistently prepare Master level scoresheets.

The challenges of tackling this issue starts with the need for the BJCP to develop and agree upon a clear body of knowledge for each judging level. Development of level specific exams, training materials, and grader training are all goals we can strive for over the next 3 years.

Administering such an exam system will not be easy, but could it be more difficult than the situation we face now with a serious bottleneck on the number of judges we can get into the organization, limitations on the number of exams per month, number of examinees per location, and the effort required to grade the current 6-beer Judging Exam?

3) Identify your major short term goal and major long term goal, if elected to the BJCP Board, and your plan to implement change or improvement in order to carry out each of these goals.

My major short term goal is connect our members with the inner workings of the organization by opening up our Board and Committee meetings to observers (on mute), by creating and using forums for member and officer interaction like the Newsletter, update emails, and Facebook groups. I would like to survey the members in my region to find out what they get out of their membership as well as their ideas and concerns. I think we should develop a membership committee to focus on providing more value to our members and to help new judges understand the program we have developed.

My major long term goal is to develop our infrastructure to allow more people to participate in making our organization better. This could be accomplished by appointing a volunteer coordinator who connects people’s talents, skills, and interests up with projects they are passionate about. We need to spend some time training our leadership on managing groups of volunteers and getting results without doing all of the work themselves and burning out.

4) If elected, please explain your level of committment, time and energy for committee projects, judging, exam grading, organizing competitions, as well as representing the BJCP to the public and being responsive to our members.

If elected as a Regional Representative, I will focus my time on speaking with our members to bring issues and ideas to the board. I will spend time getting to know people and their interests and connect them up with the committees performing the improvement work.

As a professional project manager, my goal will be to set up teams of the right people with clear objectives, a reasonable timeline, and to coach them to keep them on track.

I will continue to judge competitions, but will likely discontinue giving and grading exams to allow me to focus on being responsive to members and connecting people.

5) Please describe your previous participation in BJCP activities and years of experience.

I joined the BJCP in early 2009, became a National level judge in August 2011, and a Mead Judge in February 2013.

My BJCP activities have included:

• Helping to build an active BJCP Continuing Education Program (CEP) in San Diego to train new judges and to keep existing BJCP judges sharp.
• As I was transitioning from running CEP events to Administering Exams:
  • I recruited and coached three additional experienced judges to enable them to take over the CEP activities. San Diego continues to have monthly CEP sessions in both North and Central county. These have been a great way to introduce prospective judges to judging and to enable experienced judges to continue improving their skills between exams.
  • I also recruited two National level judges who had never served as Exam Administrators before and walked them through the process so I could learn the ropes. I maintained the RSVP list and ran the review classes while they organized the exam beers and handled the BJCP paperwork.
• During this time I began to develop an exam preparation checklist that lays out things to do and timelines from scheduling the exam with BJCP up to 2 years in advance with through checking to see how the class scored 6 months after the exam.
• Since then, I have administered seven exams with two more still on the exam schedule including one in Las Vegas in February 2015, where they do not have any National or Master level judges to administer the exam.
• Recently, I began transitioning Exam Administration duties to two National and Master level judges. Using the checklist that has been refined over the years made this transition easy and I know the Exam program in San Diego is in good hands. We are even planning an exam in Tijuana, Mexico next year to help plant some beer judging seeds across the border.
• In 2011, I served on the BJCP Online Entrance Exam committee, helping prepare and check the pool of 5,000+ multiple choice questions used on the exam.
• In 2012, I began grading exams to help qualify our exams in San Diego for 20 seats, rather than the typical 12 seat maximum. I have graded 3 exam sets since then, and now I feel passionately that we need to continue to do more to lift the burden of grading and remove the bottlenecks in our process that prevent us from welcoming more new members into our ranks.
• I have attended the National Homebrewers Conference each year since Minnesota 2010 and I always participate in the BJCP members meetings. Until very recently, these BJCP members meetings seemed to be the only way to get updates on the inner workings of the organization from BJCP officers.
• At the BJCP Member’s meeting last year in Philadelphia, I proposed the idea of developing a BJCP Newsletter, but the BJCP officer’s response was that we had tried it before and a large email list was too difficult to manage. I responded that the BJCP was the only organization I had ever been a part of that did not proactively communicate with its members. Nine months later, we have a BJCP Newsletter and I plan to contribute content.

6) Please explain why you want to be a member of the BJCP Board.

I have gained a lot of knowledge and good friends through my involvement with the BJCP. I have noticed that the more effort I put into something, the more I get back out of it. I believe that will hold true with participation in the BJCP Board.

I will bring energy, new ideas, organizational skills, ability to deliver results, and a desire to include more of our membership in the inner workings of the BJCP to my position as West Regional Representative.

I will stay focused on providing more value to our members, removing roadblocks that frustrate judges, and ultimately better serving competition brewers better.

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Mr. Hammond's candidate statement may be found at /docs/2014travis.pdf

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The BJCP Bulletin wishes all candidates the best of luck in the 2014 elections.

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