Going for Level Two

In July of 2013, at the Beer Bloggers Conference in Boston, I met Ray Daniels for the first time. He is the founder of the Cicerone® program and was our speaker the next morning. Over beers during the Night of Many Bottles, I introduced myself and told him I was studying for the level two exam. Then I said to him I was scared of the exam. His matter-of-fact answer frightened me more, “You should be.”

In my last post, I talked about my first steps on the journey to become an Advanced Cicerone®. I didn’t intend to go so far, but once I started, I discovered a new world and realized there was so much to learn. I had no idea I’d keep going when I became a Certified Beer Server. My intent was one and done.

But then my love for learning about beer had been fanned from a spark into a bonfire. So I downloaded the level two Certified Cicerone® syllabus and ran the numbers on how the scores were calculated. I got the crazy idea that I could pass!

There are five core areas of knowledge in the Cicerone® program:

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

As a homebrewer, Beer Style and Beer Ingredients and Brewing Process seemed right up my alley. The Beer Ingredients and Brewing Process section has always been my strongest. But the Beer & Food part terrified me, it was and may still be my weakest of the five subjects, but it was only 10% of the total score. The tasting portion was 16.75% of the score and there were off flavor-tasting kits you could get (I strongly recommend you do).

So I came up with a study plan. At the time, the Road to Cicerone books weren’t available. There are four now and you should get them. They cover 2.5 of the five areas of knowledge. I say 2.5 because the style courses for German/Czech and British/Irish beer are available, the books for Belgian or American beer styles are not published yet. The others cover Keeping & Serving and Brewing Ingredients and Process. Hopefully, the Food Pairing and Flavor Evaluation style books are in the works.

My primary study materials were:

• Mosher’s Tasting Beer
• Oliver’s The Oxford Companion to Beer
• Oliver’s The Brewmaster’s Table
• Palmer’s How to Brew
• The Draft Quality Manual
• The BJCP Style Guidelines

If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s being a student. I love learning new things, writing about them and taking exams. Seriously, I’m weird that way. I was semi-addicted to grad school from 1999-2009. But now I had a subject that really mattered, beer. It’s way more fun than business administration or information systems.

I started by reading the books and marking them up. Then I sat down with the syllabus and the books and made note cards with information about everything I needed to know. I spent about 200 hours in preparation and ended up with about 300 cards (which grew to 750 of the first attempt of the level three exam, and to over 1000 by the time I finally passed level three).

For the tasting, I drank a lot of beer. Honestly, I didn’t have a good plan for the tasting portion. I just tried to drink a lot of different styles. I also got to attend an off-flavor tasting training with the beer reps from DET Distributing.

About three months into the process, June 14, 2013, I registered for the level two exam. I knew that a hard deadline would get me motivated even more. That gave me four months until the test on November 12. I was nervous but felt like I had made a thorough effort to prepare. I thought I was ready when the day came.

To be continued…