Getting Certified – Part 3 in my Journey to Advanced Cicerone®

I’ve taken a lot of exams in my life, but I was never more nervous than when I sat for the Certified Cicerone® exam on November 12, 2013. I had worked hard to learn the materials but woke up feeling rough, my allergies were in full effect. That was not a good sign.

I got there early and just sat in my car. I brought note cards but didn’t look at them. At that point I figured if I didn’t know something yet, I wasn’t going to learn it in 15 minutes. My buddies John and Clyde were there with me taking the exam for the first time as well.

The exam is four hours longs and has three major sections covering five subject areas (see the previous post for details on the subjects tested):

• Written: approximately 150 short answer questions and three essay questions covering Keeping and Serving Beer, Beer Styles, Beer Ingredients and Brewing Process.
• Tasting: Blind tasting of 12 beers to assess quality, style, and servability.
• Demonstration: The examinee is recorded doing a task from the Keeping & Serving knowledge area

The written part was tough, thorough, and wide-ranging. It is is not an exam you can fake your way through if you don’t know the material. I hadn’t written an essay since finishing grad school four years earlier. Luckily, in the broad range of questions they could have asked, I got three questions that I felt comfortable answering. The beer style essay that day was Saison, one of my favorites. The short answer was sufficiently difficult, it made you think, but wasn’t too hard if you put the study time in.

The tasting exam was next, and my sniffer was still clogged up. I wasn’t feeling up to it but jumped into the samples. I was REALLY off on a few. I learned that day how tricky tasting can be; if you’re having an off day physically, you’re going in at a disadvantage. That lesson would be confirmed in July 2017 when I retook the Advanced tasting exam in Chicago and flubbed it.

We finished with the demonstration from the Keeping and Serving knowledge area. Nearly every Certified Cicerone® I’ve talked to had to demonstrate how to clean a draft faucet. I had practiced on a jockey box at my local homebrew store. But the demonstration could be anything from the Keeping and Serving syllabus. Know how to wash a glass so it’s “beer clean.” You should know how to correctly pour a beer, especially one from a Cork-and-Cage bottle.

I walked out feeling thoroughly spent. Mentally and physically. I had no idea if I passed. I felt good, like I had given it a solid effort, but wasn’t sure it was enough. That’s true for every Cicerone® exam I’ve taken. They wear you out. I got my results on December 11, 2013. It was a good news-bad news situation.

I did not pass because my tasting score was 60, and you have to have a minimum of 70 on the tasting portion. The way I felt that day, no surprise there. My overall score was 86, comfortably above the 80 needed to pass. Factoring out the tasting score, my written and demonstration score was about 91. The tasting score really dragged down my overall.

My buddies John and Clyde easily passed tasting, but came up a few points short on the written portion of the exam. Luckily for all three of us, there was an upcoming level two exam on February 18, 2014, in Asheville. We all agreed to head there together and try it again. They had to retake the written portion, I was repeating tasting only. It was nice to not worry about the written part again, but I brought my note cards and quizzed them for the entire five-hour drive into the mountains.

To prepare for the tasting retake, I bought the off flavor training kit and a bottle of the best commercial example of every beer style listed on the syllabus that I could find. I tell everyone, it’s going to be very difficult to pass without doing the off-flavor training. You need to mix up the samples and do blind tasting.

One of the nice things about the tasting exam is that the proctor will go over the beers tasted and you have a general idea of how you did. Unlike my first attempt, I crushed the second. I didn’t think I got 100% right, but I felt like my score was in the mid-90s. Although I wouldn’t get the official results for another month, I walked out of that room knowing I was a Certified Cicerone®. The results confirmed it a few weeks later with a tasting score of 98 and an overall of 92. That was even better than I thought I could do.

I was finally a Certified Cicerone® and I knew I was done. I was certain that going for Master was not for me. I had gone as far in the Cicerone® program as I thought I could ever go.

I was wrong.