The Beer Judge Certification Program or BJCP is a non-profit organization formed in 1985 "to promote beer literacy and the appreciation of real beer, and to recognize beer tasting and evaluation skills." It has been described in the press as a "hands-on ... study program designed to teach aspiring beer enthusiasts about the essence of any kind of beer". The BJCP certifies and ranks beer judges through an examination and monitoring process. Membership is limited to beer judges who have taken the BJCP exam. For more information about the BJCP, see BJCP.org.
As part of learning how to become a judge, the BJCP has a continuing education program along with several resources in the community that help you prepare to become a judge. The purpose of this game is to help you along in your journey.
The BJCP Trivia app is a voice enabled Skill for the Amazon Echo in which people can use to self-study for the BJCP certification by listening to Alexa ask questions and then respond in natural language. There are already several apps for Android, iOS, Windows, and Web which allow people to learn about the styles in one format and this would help augment the learning experience for those people that have the Amazon Echo. To see more about using the Amazon Echo during your brewing day, see this article.
The idea around contributions is to generate a large pool of questions that can help people further their education around the BJCP. You can do this in one of several ways:
- Edit the source code for BJCPTrivia.js and submit a pull request for me to incorporate the changes. I'm only looking for new questions/answers and do not plan to incorporate a ton of changes to the actual code itself.
- Submit an issue against the repo and I can incorporate the changes.
Periodically I will update the code in Azure Web Services to incorporate all of the changes/asks.