Beer Matters
Becoming a Smarter Beer Drinker BY JAMIE DOOM THERE IS AN OLD ADAGE that anything worth doing is worth doing well, and I have come to learn that this “anything” includes beer, especially drinking beer. Whether you intend on pursuing a more rigorous beer certification program or you would rather casually follow the self-taught path, the most underrated part of becoming more knowledgeable of beer is that it will require you to drink beer at every step. And for many of us, what embodies higher education more than drinking booze and studying? The Cicerone Program Much like wine has the Sommelier program; beer has the Cicerone program. There are four levels to the Cicerone Certification Program (cicerone.org). The Certified Beer Server (Level 1) can be taken online and many breweries around the Sandhills require their beer-tenders to have this training (currently over 125,000 people have achieved 26 | SAND& PINE MAGAZINE August/September 2021
this entry level certification). Level 2 or “Cicerone” is much more rigorous and will require travel to testing centers around the Southeast (currently just over 4,000 people are certified Cicerones). Level 3 is the Advanced Cicerone and will probably require you getting on a plane and spending a couple hundred hours of study. Level 4 is Master Cicerone, and there are only 19 Master Cicerones in the entire world. One of them, Joe Vogelbacher, is the owner of Sugar Creek Brewing in Charlotte. I find the resources at cicerone.org extremely valuable. If you consider yourself even a little bit of a beer aficionado, I suggest you register, use the free resources and then take the certified beer server test. If you’re going to be having beer, why not know as much as possible about it? It’s a wonderful opportunity to impress and even annoy your friends and family. If this all sounds too academic and serious, however, I encourage you to be a beer autodidact. The Self-Taught Beer Way Falling into a delicious rabbit hole of beer doesn’t have to feel like work, and we’ve never had more resources and knowledge available about beer than this exact moment. So whether you want to learn about beer styles, brew your own beer and create your own recipes, or fully taste beer
