Lynn News Bar Man: Good Beer Guide, Camra, Pub of the Year, high and low grades

Bar Man by Jeff Hoyle

A lifetime in education made me realise how difficult it is to make accurate assessments. We tried many methods. Sometimes we would assign grades based on a normal distribution, say two A’s, 4 B’s fifteen C’s 4 D’s and a couple of E’s.

This worked fine until someone broke the rules and awarded higher grades because a pupil was very nice and worked hard. We could set an exam and award grades based on the marks achieved, but there was always a difficult decision on where to place the grade boundaries. Too many top grades and it was seen as too easy, too few and it was seen as too difficult. Anyway, who wants to be the person that always awards low grades?

Better perhaps to be seen as one whose pupils always do well. External exams were even more of a minefield. How much help and guidance is acceptable for coursework?

Are pupils entitled to extra help such as a longer time to complete exams or a reader or amanuensis to help read or write the script.

Add in the increasing use of technology, helicopter and snowplough parents and education secretaries who want every pupil to be above average, media rage if grades are either too high (grade inflation) or too low (rubbish teaching) and it seemed impossible to get right.

Surely assessing the quality of beer or cider is easy compared to this. Well, perhaps not. How much does the pub environment contribute to your score?

Do you consciously or unconsciously award higher grades if you are a regular, know the staff well or even have a financial interest in the pub?

Can you rate a beer highly as a product if you don’t actually like that style? It’s not the end of the world, but we do use the accumulated scores to help decide our entries to the annual Good Beer Guide, our Pub of the Year and various other awards such as champion beer.

Normally there is no problem. I recognise that some people are more generous than others and as long as they are consistent, this makes little difference. Occasionally there are large disparities, something I have noticed when assessing cider, but this may be down to a particular flavour that some people are genetically able to either taste or not taste.

Over the years there have been very few problems with our system. One person entered a few high scores for a place where he worked, another rated his regular perfect for every pint, but a little negotiation sorted out these problems.

However, with the Good Beer Selection meeting fast approaching, I have encountered a new problem. One pub in particular has shot up the rankings, having benefitted from the generosity of a member who lives outside our area.

I cannot contact him to ask why this should be, and in truth I am loathe to criticise any member who takes the trouble to score their beer and I am all for using the full range of marks, but perhaps not the maximum for every pint.

I don’t know what the motivation is, but it may have the opposite effect intended. If the scores had been mainly 4 or 4.5 with the odd perfect 5, the pub in question would probably have been selected for entry to the Guide.

As it is, members have the opportunity to question whether the ranking of the pub is justified and maybe exclude it, which would be a shame as I popped in to try it recently and found it fine.

Well above average in fact.