January 3, 2018: Our Tenth Anniversary!

Ten years ago on this date, exams went live on the Cicerone Certification Program website for the first time. Thanks to advance promotion, we sold ten Certified Beer Server exams that day, but that would turn out to be one of the biggest days of the entire first year.

That launch was the culmination of nearly a year of thinking, research, development, and testing. At the time, I was the sole representative of Cicerone—and I undertook the effort on a part-time basis since I still had ongoing responsibilities as publisher for Brewers Publications.

The question that most people ask me about the founding of the program is, “Why?” Specifically: why did I decide to start a beer sommelier program?

I always say that the answer is simple: Bad beer.

By 2008, I had been involved in the beer world in a variety of ways for nearly 20 years. I’d run homebrew competitions, tastings of commercial brews, and beer festivals. I had written articles and books and taught sessions for everyone from consumers to professional chefs not only all over the US, but overseas as well. 

Until late 2006, I’d been Director of Craft Beer Marketing for the Brewers Association. In that role, I had traveled all over the country promoting American craft brewers, which of course meant that I drank those beers wherever I went. 

I already knew from my 20 years of craft beer drinking experience that beer could be bad. But in the course of those wide-ranging travels for the BA, I found that bad beer service was far more common than it should be. Servers often knew nothing about the beers on tap, bars had no idea how to operate or maintain their draft systems, and attention to freshness was often non-existent. One day I thought, “somebody should do something to make servers more knowledgeable about beer.” 

Starting in December 2006, I started working part time for the BA, telecommuting from Chicago. After seven years of association work, I was ready for something new, so I started thinking about what that might be. Certainly craft beer was on the upswing again—a contrast to the doldrums it had been in when I started working for them in 1999. So I thought about and investigated some beer-related business ideas like bottle shops and brewpubs. I also checked in with the still-limited list of local brewers about opportunities.

Eventually my observations about retail beer quality came back to me. The problem was evident. The question was what could I do about it as a solo entrepreneur?

It wasn’t much of a leap to come up with the concept of “beer sommelier.” Indeed, some had already adopted that title for themselves in beer-centric restaurants at that time. It was a logical construction for anyone familiar with the hospitality world. But those self-styled beer somms seemed to draw heavily on the model established by wine: a single beer expert on staff to be consulted about beer selections and to present special bottles at the table. As a long-time beer consumer, I didn’t have much interest in that sort of service. And I was pretty sure the concept wouldn’t get much traction in the wider world of beer.

The other problem with beer sommeliers was variability in qualifications. Since it was a self-appointed title, you had no idea what they actually knew. And my experiences had already taught me that there was plenty of bad beer being served by people who thought of it as their specialty.

From all of this came the idea of starting a certification program for beer professionals. Not brewers—but people who work with beer, who talk about beer, every day. I focused on this group because they are the ones who most influence the consumer’s experience with beer. They control beer quality once the brewer finishes packaging it. And they interact with the customers—at all levels—where it is important to convey accurate, practical knowledge about the beers in order to be effective.

From the very beginning, my scope included every non-brewer in the industry from retail servers to brewery presidents. And in fact, within the first two years, we would have participants in that full range of job titles.

Most people set on expanding the knowledge and skills of a group would probably decide to teach classes. As a result, to this day, one of the most common misconceptions about Cicerone is the belief that we are a school.

In fact, I decided very early on to take a different approach. Even though I already had a lot of experience as an educator, I chose to focus the Cicerone Program on certification rather than education.

The reasons for this were simple: I knew that as one person, I could not affect beer service in any significant way by just teaching classes. Even with the wonders of jet travel and Internet webinars, I knew that I could only reach a small portion of those who needed to know more about beer. On the other hand, if I developed a successful certification program and encouraged people to learn about beer in various ways from various sources, I figured I could reach more people and that way, and I might help improve beer service in a tangible way.

As it turns out, I was correct.

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Once the basic approach was established, it came time to decide what knowledge and content would be covered by the program. To represent the knowledge tested on each exam, we would offer a syllabus. The syllabus could be used by people to assess their readiness to take an exam and also as a guide to what they needed to study in preparation. Internally, each syllabus would guide creation of exams and the writing of individual questions.

At the start of syllabus creation, I asked: what should the world’s greatest beer expert know? I put all my thoughts together and consulted with a range of experts and contacts in the industry. Soon I was not just asking for ideas, but showing people a draft. The resulting document became what we now refer to as our “Master Syllabus.” This document guides those preparing for the top-level Master Cicerone exam and it serves as the starting point for all of our other syllabi as well. (You can access each of the four syllabi on the website at no charge.)

That first syllabus was organized into five broad areas of knowledge that still serve as the structure for the program today:

1.  Keeping and Serving Beer
2. Beer Styles
3. Beer Flavor and Evaluation
4. Beer Ingredients and Brewing Processes
5. Pairing Beer with Food

The order of these five areas reflects the priority they take as people go through the program. The first-level Certified Beer Server exam focuses on the first two items (Keeping and Serving and Beer Styles) because they are essential to presenting great beer to the consumer and talking to customers about the beers you have available. The second-level Certified Cicerone exam covers all five areas to a degree, but the first three account for 75% of the points. Not until the top-level Master Cicerone exam do all five areas carry equal weight in calculating the exam score. 

In addition, there are subjects within each of the five areas that get added as you proceed through the program. Here are some samples of how the knowledge in one subject can progress through the four levels of the program from the Keeping and Serving portion of the syllabus:

Certified Beer Server: how to pour a beer; how to wash a glass

Certified Cicerone: how to clean a draft system; matching appropriate glass to beer style

Advanced Cicerone: filling, safety, and legal issues for growlers; jockey box setup

Master Cicerone: how to design a draft system; determine Vols/CO₂ in a keg of beer

In the early days of the program, we supplemented the syllabus with study guides pointing people to useful links, books, and courses that could help them prepare for each exam—and we still do this today, providing a whole list of non-Cicerone resources that people can use in studying. But as the certifications began to catch on, we received more and more requests for for classes put on by Cicerone.

Despite the frequent requests for classes, I resisted doing it, in large part because I wanted to encourage other organizations to expand their own beer training efforts to prepare people for our exams. I figured that the only way to reach all of the people who needed to learn about beer was for there to be many teachers, many courses, many books—in many locations all over the country—all aimed at helping people learn the material in our syllabi.

Ultimately, this model has worked. While we offer training programs at a couple of levels today, we always make clear to people that they are not required to take classes from us. Currently fewer than one in ten exam candidates receives training directly from Cicerone. At the same time, the list of schools and individuals offering training to prepare people for Cicerone exams grows every year.

Fun link: The original Cicerone.org website, circa January 2008.

Up next: Picking a Name or What about “Marquis de Cerevisiae?”