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I was intrigued by the aesthetically minded, theoretically objective judgments on display at the cat show and, by contrast, the rigorous, detached sensory analysis of the “human instruments” at McCormick. These seemed to represent two sides of the human brain. I wondered what happens when you effectively combine these two pursuits; that is, when you try to make a qualitative judgment of something that you have put in your mouth.

And so I headed to Denver, Colorado, where, in the basement-level conference rooms of a large hotel, judging was under way for the Great American Beer Festival (GABF)—the Super Bowl of the American craft beer renaissance. There, in a vast “staging room,” I found the festival's director, Chris Swersey, standing in the center of a sea of stouts and
saisons
, all precisely chilled to thirty-eight degrees, waiting to be poured, randomized, and dispatched to panels in the neighboring rooms. Speed was of the essence. “In twenty minutes' time, those samples will taste totally different,” he said as he scanned the room.

As Swersey—middle-aged, goateed, and, like many of the beer people I seemed to meet, extremely affable and engaged—described it, the judging at GABF is a sort of “tweener.” “We're not 100 percent subjective or 100 percent objective,” he told me. A purely objective judging
would hew strictly to the standards, with precise measures of IBUs (or International Bitterness Units) and “final gravity.” This sounds like something astronauts experience, but in beers it refers to the liquid's density at fermentation, measured in “degrees Plato.” As Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery, had told me, beer people tend to talk like scientists—“here's our EBV, here's our IBU, our final gravity”—while the “wine guy is talking about rolling hills.”

A purely subjective judging, by contrast, would see judges going down a list of a dozen beers and expressing liking. “You might give it a one because you love apricot,” says Swersey, “or you hate it because you don't like apricot.” Some judging styles are more pleasure based. In some beer competitions in England, for example, judges are asked questions like “Would you go out of your way to drink this beer?”
*

The judging in Denver was held under the usual strict secrecy. Judges with mobile phones have been asked to leave. Swersey, going against usual GABF protocol, has allowed me to sit in and briefly observe—but not record or take notes on—the judging for the American-style stout category. The first thing he wants me to know is that beer judges do not spit. This is not because zythologists inherently lack willpower. “There are taste buds down below your Adam's apple that are highly attuned to hop components,” Swersey told me. “It's proven in the research: You have to swallow it to get a full profile of that beer.” Swallowing is only a small part of the whole process. Aroma, for Swersey, is the first step. “Aromas are very ethereal, they tend to disappear, and then you'll get a whole new suite later. You have to get on that beer fast and capture what you're smelling.”

As we joined the stout panel and I began listening to their comments, it seemed like a more jocular and opinionated version of the McCormick sensory panel. There is similar descriptive language: “condensed milk,” “solventy,” “burnt vegetables,” or, my favorite, “I wouldn't call it horse blanket.” This is joined, however, by more expressive comments like “pretty amazing,” “really clear,” or, simply, “I just like that beer.” Watching the panelists, I am reminded of something James Shanteau, the psychologist of expertise, had implied to me: Experts are people who have the same opinions as other experts. The panels here, Swersey
said, are not about taste tyrants imposing their will but about finding carefully considered consensus on what beers best represent the particular style guidelines. “I don't really like conversations that go like this: ‘Well, I was in Belgium last month, and I tasted this and this and this, and this doesn't taste like any of those.' ”

While a beer competition might seem a world away from the Paris cat show, all the same issues are in play. There is the phenomenon of changing standards. Consider IPA, or India pale ale. Pale ales, as one of the stronger ales, are in general prized for their hoppy (that is, bitter) character. This in itself is a hallmark of beer connoisseurship. An interesting study by the Stanford University computer scientists Julian McAuley and Jure Leskovec examined review data on the popular Web site RateBeer.​com. One of the ways you could distinguish novice reviewers from expert reviewers, they found, was that expert reviewers' opinions, as I have mentioned, tend toward concurrence. In certain genres of beers, however, expert and novice reviews almost
entirely
diverged. As they write, “Beginners give higher ratings to almost all lagers, while experts give higher ratings to almost all strong ales.” And while no one really cares much for Bud Light on the site, experts
really
dislike it. Strong ales, apart from being an “acquired taste,” indicate where you stand in relation to beer, the way the Velvet Underground became a totemic marker of one's musical taste.

The question of what an India pale ale is might seem settled. “In its heyday,” Brooklyn's Oliver told me, “IPA was probably the most specific thing ever created; it was made to survive a sea voyage from England to India. It was always made dry, always bitter, always pale.” But time, and the market, move on; to Oliver's distaste, there are now brews like the seemingly paradoxical Black IPA. In the staging room in Denver, Swersey poured me a glass of Mojo IPA, from Colorado's Boulder Beer. “This is a really hoppy IPA,” says Swersey. “It's got Amarillo hops, which has a really intense grapefruit taste.” There were also notes of spruce. “A lot of the same compounds in hop oil,” he noted, “are identical to what you would have in a spruce tree.” All this certainly seems to hew to the GABF standard for American-style India pale ale: “Hop aroma is high, exhibiting floral, fruity, citrus-like, piney, resinous, or sulfur-like American-variety hop characters.”

But he suddenly snapped to quizzical attention. “They entered it as a strong pale ale,” he says, referring to another GABF category,
with less alcohol content. “They under-entered it.” It was like putting a heavyweight boxer in the middleweight division. Perhaps, Swersey mused, Mojo IPA is actually in the American strong pale ale range (even if it has been marketed as an IPA). What is more likely is that the entire IPA landscape has shifted; everything got hoppier, more bitter. What was once a perfectly respectable IPA suddenly seems, by the rest of the entrants in the category, to be a pale imitation. “This beer is about seven or eight years old,” he said. “IPAs may have grown up around them, past them.”

Like the Persian cats, the product has gradually been getting more extreme, even if the same written standard still seems to apply. Consider one of the seminal American-style IPAs, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, which was first brewed in the early 1980s and is now one of the country's most popular craft brews. “Back in the day,” Swersey said, “it was a groundbreaking beer. It was unlike anything being made anywhere on earth. It really challenged people.” While he says Sierra is still the beer that he, and other brewers he knows, “always keep in the fridge,” it is “far out in the weeds” compared with Mojo; that is, it seems like pale ale with training wheels. Just by bittering units alone, the change is dramatic: Sierra Nevada has thirty-eight, while Mojo has seventy.

Categories set the entire landscape for liking. Even large, mainstream beers like Budweiser and Pabst Blue Ribbon, the less intensely flavored, more industrially produced brews that the craft movement essentially defines itself against, have their own category at GABF: American-style lager (“hop flavor is none to very low”; “corn, rice, or other grain or sugar adjuncts often used”). I found this a bit odd, as if the Sundance Film Festival had a category for “Big Hollywood Summer Action Flick.” But it just reinforces the power of categories. Before you can determine whether something is good, you have to define good as
what
?

There are many people who would view something like Budweiser as not “real” beer. And there are many more people who actually drink Budweiser. The management professors David Choi and Martin Stack argue that the U.S. beer market has become “
locked in a sub-optimal equilibrium in which most consumers are not familiar with the full range of what beer is and can be.” Why? Prohibition, for one. People simply
forgot
the taste of beer. Post-Prohibition lagers, perhaps influenced by soft drinks, were higher in carbonation and made from
gradually shrinking amounts of malt and hops. They literally lost their taste. The second factor was a post-Prohibition switch from draft beer to bottles and cans and a related insistence on serving beer “ice cold” (which “deadens” the taste). Over time, “consumers began to associate ‘beer' with an increasingly narrow range of product characteristics.” Why bother switching beers if the beer you were drinking was good enough, if it
was
beer? GABF, simply by having a category for this kind of beer, could get around the entire sticky question.

In beer (and in cats), I kept running into an endless loop of circularity.
What is a good beer? A good beer is one that best represents the standard. What makes the standard? Those things that people think make a beer good
. Repeat. And something else:
A good beer is one that best represents the standard. Then why did the standard change? Because people's thought of what a good beer was changed. Does that mean that what was once a good beer is no longer a good beer?

Could there be a universally good beer—or cat? The philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his
Critique of Judgment
, suggested that our liking of merely “agreeable” things like wine (or beer or cats) was hopelessly subjective:

Taste judgment, Kant said, can only be “pure so far as its determining ground is tainted with no merely empirical delight.” And so while the cat show or beer festival judges were, in one sense, acting in a “disinterested” Kantian fashion, suspending their own preferences for the sake of a larger set of criteria, the very fact that they had put criteria on the things they were judging, for Kant, rendered their judgments suspect. To fix these “rules”—“like all empirical rules, general only, not universal”—on the beauty of a human, a building, or a horse, argued Kant, is to “presuppose a concept of the end that determines what the thing should be, hence a concept of its perfection, and is thus merely
adherent beauty.” As the philosopher Matt Lawrence puts it, paraphrasing what Kant
might
have said about beer, “
There is something about these beers themselves that makes them great.” Not because of the reasons someone says they are great.

What Kant was trying to do, in his famously thorny and “forbidding” text, notes the Kant scholar Christian Wenzel, was to resolve the very dilemma I sensed was cropping up in the notion of shifting aesthetic standards:
Was taste subjective or objective?
“
On the one hand,” Wenzel notes, “the pleasure involved in a judgment of taste cannot be completely subjective. Otherwise, the claim that everyone should agree could never be justified; such a claim could not even arise and there would not be any quarrel in matters of taste.”

So people cannot simply describe a cat or beer as good, for what would that mean, and how would we know which one was better? But “the grounds for pleasure in aesthetic contemplation cannot be completely objective either,” notes Wenzel, “because then quarrels in matters of taste could be settled in a scientific fashion (as in physics).” A machine could tell you which beer was better. Taste—capital
-T
taste, the sort that conveys a judgment on what you are tasting—seems to occupy some hazy middle ground. What the apparatus of judging seems to do is to give people a way to talk about taste without really talking about taste, or at least anybody's
individual
taste.

So what is a good beer? I put the question to a small group of judges at the end of the festival's first day after they had endured many rounds of tasting. Appropriately—or curiously, perhaps—the conversation took place over beers, pilsners from Left Hand Brewing. “Judging takes a lot of concentration,” Jamie Floyd, the tattooed, spiky-haired, and perpetually energetic owner of Ninkasi Brewing, based in Eugene, Oregon, told me. “It is good to have a nice clean pilsner in front of you.”

What the judges first wanted me to know was that as analytical as they tried to be, at the end of the day they are humans, with human predilections. “We start out trying to be very objective, judging to these parameters of the style of criteria,” said Brad Kraus, the rangy, cowboy-hat-wearing
maestro cervecero
at the Panamanian brewer La Rana Dorada. “But you have to be a little subjective, otherwise a machine could do this.” A beer might hit all of the style guidelines, but was it
actually a good beer? “Our brewery has an analytical lab and a sensory lab,” added Floyd. “We have both of them—because lab equipment doesn't drink beer.”

While Shanteau had told me one of the hallmarks of experts was convincing others they were experts, I sensed that the judges were surprisingly forthcoming in their own insecurity. I had noted that the setup of the stout judging panel had felt to me like a poker game: people grouped around a circular table trying to look as innocuous as possible as they studied what was in front of them (the beers are shuffled so facial gestures do not give away their “hand”).