WIll Certified Cicerone exam become easier?

It's very challenging compared to the online CBS test. You must be able to write essays on three topics: beer service, brewing process and beer styles. You have to do a demonstration. You must also answer fill in the blank questions on the 3 subjects above plus flavor & evaluation, and beer & food pairing. The tasting is 12 sample - 4 style identification (pick from 2 choices, such as "is this a dubbel or a doppelbock" (it's harder than it sounds)), 4 off flavor identification, and 4 "Is this serverable?" samples. Get a part time job at a beer bar, you'll learn a lot, especially about draft systems, which you'll need to know how to troubleshoot. There are 3 books you really need. Mosher's Tasting Beer and Oliver's Brewmaster Table and also his Oxford Companion to Beer. The Cicerone Program's Road to Cicerone books are very good, but not cheap. But very, very well done. Also, the Beer Scholar sells a study guide that has all you need to know, it's like $60 or so. And practice. Buy 60 beers of different styles and have you buddies group them and do blind tasting, about 5 at a time. It'll help you identify styles. You can do the off flavor test w/o the benefit of buying the cicerone off flavor kit, but I wouldn't. You really need to be able to taste diacetly, dms, acetaldehyde, tran-2-nonenal, acetic acid and MBT (skunkiness). Anyone can do it, it just takes work. I'd say about 100 hours of prep, and you can pass it. The syllabus is thorough, learn everything on it. Make flash cards on everything. But the test fees, study material and beer isn't cheap. Count on spending $1,000.

 

Thanks for that thorough breakdown.
And how does the tasting part of the Certified Cicerone compares to the Advanced? How did they build up on the difficulty? If we may know.

 

This is all in the syllabus and online exam info, so I'm not giving away any secrets. In the style identification, you have to pick from one of four styles instead of one of two, so its easier to be wrong. The off flavor list is doubled: acetaldehyde, acetic acid, chlorophenol, diacetyl, DMS, H2S, isovaleric acid, lactic acid, lightstruck (skunky), mercaptan, metallic, and trans-2-nonenal. And instead of determining if a beer is fit for service, you have to write a description of the flavor and aromas. Some descriptions are consumer focused, while other are written for industry people. Sounds easy, but when you only have a few minutes to finish the assessment, it's tougher than it sounds.

 

Thanks for the follow up. I would love to test myself and expand my knowledge. I love gaining a deep knowledge in an area, and I find i need this type of exam and study system to focus. I'd love to work in the beer industry in some capacity, but I can't imagine walking away from my career and explaining that to my wife.

I think I have a good palate, but I'm curious to test that. I can usually pick out specific hop flavors, but I don't often know the name of the hop the flavor comes from. It's usually "that is the hop predominant in X beer." Looking up the ingredients is inconsistent at best. I've gotten into home brewing recently, and looking at clone recipes, the ingredients for the same beer are all over the place.

Any good, accurate sites for finding the ingredients in various beers? It seems a lot of breweries don't publish the ingredients.

 

What's the point of getting the certificate? Self pride? Jobs?

 

You can train for off flavors. Not everyone has the same threshold, but you should be able to get most of them. A friends wife simply can't smell/taste skuny. It's weird. Some people can't get Diacetyl, the buttery off flavor that is one of the most common, while I'm quite sensitive to it. Other flavors are learnable too, just takes tasting a lot of stuff.

 

Almost everyone doing it is in the beer industry. Brewers, Sales Reps, Distributor staff, Bar staff, etc.

 

But isn't taste subjective. I'm a fermentation major and in sensory class we learn about thresholds for tasters/ taste buds... certain people cannot detect flavors that others are really sensitive to. So these people cannot receive a cicerone because of this? They don't have a "good enough" palate?

That came off kind of jerk-ish, but i'm sincerely wondering.

 

There's certainly that element. But I believe the number of people who could not pass level 2 cicerone because of the lack of sensitivity are extremely low. But the other end of the spectrum explains why there are so few Master Cicerones. They have highly sensitive palates that the average person do not have. But that's what makes it challenging, everyone is very different when it come to taste perception.

 

So im guessing the cicerone is based more around knowledge of all beer styles/ off flavors in fermentation +/- some other stuff?

 

See above... you have to know that plus about the brewing process, beer/food pairing and retail service. It's an all around deal.

 

Oh, nice.