John Bender begins by laying out his view on what the proper role of a wine critic should be:

“a good wine taster is one who perceives, differentiates, and attends to the complete set of properties that a wine exemplifies, bases his or her aesthetic descriptions on those perceptions, and grounds a final evaluation of the wine on these descriptions and interpretations.”

Involved in this procedure is:

“acuity, attention, sensibility, sensitivity, memory, and experience. It involves objective perception.”

In essence, when an individual gives a description of a wine, that individual is reporting what is to be found in the wine. A wine description (and by extension, beer) should involve describing a set of properties that are there to be found in the particular drink in question. Of course it requires a refined palate and honed vocabulary to describe the entire spectrum of possible smells and tastes in beer and wine, and the job of the critic is to move from broad descriptions to more precise ones that will better enable a drinker to discriminate between similar brews, like say a Great Lakes Lake Eerie Monster Double IPA and Stone’s Ruination IPA. And as Bender argues, when it comes to description:

“there can be an objective fact whether this Tokaj has the aroma of tea or tobacco.”

All you need is a bit of practice. And useful to this practice are the beer aroma wheel and beer flavor wheel:

These wheels help us move from very general descriptions of wines and beers (i.e. “this beer is a bit woody”) to much more precise descriptions of the particular flavor you’re experiencing (“oak”, “cedar”, “smoky”, “coffee”, and the like). Furthermore:

“These descriptions are grounded in veridical perception and are chemically justifiable: when you smell the fierce, honeyed aroma of a Sauternes, you are smelling botrytis; when you find your Cornas a little “barnyardy,” you are detecting brettanomyces; that “corked” bottle that you sent back at the restaurant because it smelled like wet newspaper really does smell of wet newspaper because that is how 2,4,6-trichloranisole smells. You are on the mark! So a precision of a wine description does not necessarily bring along with it a degree of subjectivity.”

What’s great about this procedure is that disputes over the precise taste or aroma of a particular beer or wine can be resolved.