Taking the Certified Cicerone Exam — Much Abrew About Nothing

When I walked into the Cicerone exam, at Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland, the proctor asked how I was doing, and I answered that I was excited to see the questions. Geek status confirmed.

But I was excited to see what the questions were. I’d been taking practice tests and writing practice essays, and I was eager to see how the actual test would compare. Turns out, pretty closely.

Before the Exam

The day before the exam, I’d arrived in Cleveland, had lunch at Market Garden, then strolled over to Great Lakes to see where I’d be taking the test. At the bar, I heard some GLBC employees chatting about the exam; one of them, it turned out, was taking the test. He was able to tell me a little about the testing conditions, which was comforting. I had imagined taking the test with 40 other people, but there were only 8 of us signed up.

The night before, I tucked into my Airbnb, fiddled with some draft-system doo-dads, and flipped through my notes and flash-cards. I’d listened to a few BJCP podcasts on the drive up, but I wanted to mostly avoid studying the day before the exam.

The Grocery. Check it out for a quick bite in Cleveland.

The morning of the test, I woke earlier than usual. It looks like almost all Cicerone exams start at 10am. I wish they’d offer a few afternoon exams, since a lot of us in the industry are used to working from 4pm until midnight or 1am, so waking at 8am is early for us. I got a bagel with lox at The Grocery, since I wouldn’t be eating until after the test was over, around 2pm.

The Written Portion

This entry will be text-heavy, since my phone/camera was on lock-down. Don’t worry: scroll down for a “TL;DR” list of what I took away from my exam experience.

We took the test in the third-floor events space of Great Lakes’ Brewery. I sat at a kind of wobbly circular table, with one other person sitting directly across from me. Everyone powered down their phone and sealed it in an envelope. We signed some waivers that say you can’t talk about the content of the exam (sorry, no spoilers here). The proctor read instructions, then we get started.

As I wrote my exam code on every sheet of the test, I skimmed through the questions. I read the essay questions through so I could be thinking about them as I took the test (and looking for any information about them that might be hedged in other exam questions).

I took the whole three hours allotted to complete the written portion and was the only person in my exam to do so. I had understood that you have scratch paper for each page of the test that would also be graded, but in fact we had one piece of scratch paper that no one would ever look at, for better or for worse. On it, I made a list of questions to return to after I was done and a list of questions I had not answered. There were about twenty of the former and five of the latter.

If you don’t have this resource, get it now.

The 160 fill-in-the-blank and short answer questions took about two hours to complete, leaving an hour to write the three essays. There were more multiple choice than Chris Cohen’s (otherwise very accurate) practice tests had led me to expect, and some of the questions were frustratingly vague, but mostly, the exam followed the syllabus that the Cicerone program provides as a study guide. I wasn’t always sure what the exam was looking for: for example, one short fill-in-the-blank question was juicier than the essay question on ingredients-and-process was. I’m looking forward to seeing how they grade the exam, since questions like that don’t, to me, seem to have a black-and-white “right” answer.

My essay prompt on beer styles was just about the best one I could have gotten: I could tell you about its geography, its related styles, the special ways that it’s brewed and conditioned, its ingredients, and even a little historical anecdote about it. This is the primary reason that I hope I don’t have to retake the written portion of the exam: I don’t think I could do any better on the style essay.

The ingredients-and-process and draft-system essay questions were a little thin, by comparison. For each of my practice essays, I had written pages. For these two, I wrote a couple pages, maybe 4 paragraphs. It’s not that I didn’t have the knowledge or the time to flesh these questions out. Even in hindsight and after some research, I don’t think there’s much more to say about them. The essay questions are worth 12.5% of your overall score but 15% of your score of the written portion of the exam, so maybe it’s fitting that these questions weren’t a huge part of the exam.

Can you name all the parts of this draft system?

After the written portion, I was feeling pretty good. As I said, there were about five questions that I just had no idea what the answer was, about twenty that I’m just not sure about, and a handful that I know, in hindsight, that I misidentified. Out of 160-ish questions, that’s pretty good numbers. But I keep saying that you never know how they’ll grade it, and I’ve talked to a lot of people who thought they did well right after the exam and were surprised when they didn’t pass, so you never know. So we’ll wait and see. Results take 6-8 weeks to arrive: roughly the end of this month or early April.

The Tasting Exam

We took a small break, then dove into the tasting portion. Bunches of cups were lined up on the bar in Great Lakes’ event space, lettered A-L. Each of us took a complete set of those cups and had 45 minutes to evaluate them.

If you’ve read this far, you probably know how the exam works. In the first section of the tasting exam, I could smell diacetyl from a mile away but was unsure about the other samples. At the last minute, I caught a whiff of DMS in one, which left two samples to identify. I should have just written “control” for both of them - then I’d at least have gotten 1 point. Instead, I went for it, flip-flopped control and acetaldehyde, and missed both.

Of the style identification, I thought the first one was so easy that I didn’t spend much time on it. Missed it. (I’m still flummoxed. How did I miss that one?!) I changed two correct answers to wrong answers after over-thinking them.

I botched the final section because I thought that one draft and one bottle would be unfit for service. I have no idea where I got this idea. As it turns out, it is not the case. It is possible that both bottles could be off and both drafts could be fit for service, or vice versa.

In short: I made a bunch of tactical mistakes that I won’t make next time.

To calibrate, you go over the answers as a group directly after the tasting portion, so I knew just how badly I’d bombed. I had never before failed a test, so I was shaken. Unfortunately, I still had the video portion of my exam to do. (Everyone who had finished the written portion early had done their video demonstration before the tasting portion, so I was the only one left.)

I was upset, so I asked the proctor for a few minutes to get myself together, went to the bathroom, splashed some water on my face, and came back ready to go. I had practiced for this portion so much that I could do it in my sleep, thank heavens.

After the Exam

After making my video demonstration, I went to the bathroom and cried for 30 minutes. (Bonus of being in a male-dominated industry: no one walks in on you when you’re crying in the women’s bathroom!) In hindsight, it seems silly, how upset I was. I think it had something to do with knowing definitively, immediately, that I was not a Cicerone, that this ten-year odyssey wasn’t over yet. I think it also had something to do with just how badly I’d failed; it made me wonder if I’d ever be able to pass this part. And if I couldn’t pass the tasting portion, then what did it matter if I passed the written part? If that was the case, I thought, then everything I’d done for the past couple months had been in vain.

Of course this isn’t true - every day at work, I use what I learned from studying for the Cicerone exam. But boy did it feel true at the time.

Weeks earlier, I had planed to meet with the Great Lakes tour-program manager after the exam. Everyone who took the exam, plus a few Great Lakes employees, were downstairs enjoying a pint while I was in the bathroom waiting for my eyes to not be red and puffy. I wish I hadn’t wasted that time in the bathroom, because hanging out with everyone talking about our experience of the exam was pretty fun, when I finally made it down to the taproom. I also wanted to talk to our proctor, whose beer-consulting business I would love to emulate someday. But I got there with enough time to have a few pints, start feeling better about it all, and trade contacts with other people in my industry.

Back at the Airbnb, I slept for two hours. I woke up to check out Noble Beast and Masthead, where my sister met me after her long-delayed flight from Ecuador. What a sight for sore eyes.

Take-Aways (TL;DR)

The written part of the exam is actually pretty fun - those three hours fly by.
Some of the essay questions were thinner than I expected.
You can definitely spend the full three hours completing the written part - but it may be a good idea to try to sneak in the video demonstration before the tasting portion, too.
Be strategic about the tasting portion. In the first section, if you’re unsure about two beers, you can put “control” for both; in the last section, if you think only one beer is unfit for service, go ahead and say that three are fine. That way, while you’re guaranteed to miss one point in each section, at least you’re not missing two by flip-flopping the answers. To pass, you need to miss less than three total.
Don’t overthink your first reaction to the the styles in the tasting section - to some extent. (I should have thought more about the first one, which I thought was so obvious.)
Be vocal when you go over the tasting portion as a group. Turns out that no one in my group could identify a certain off-flavor, but none of us spoke up. We should have, so the proctor could make note of it - the graders take that into account.
Take comfort in knowing that you can retake the test by portions. All may not be lost if you bomb one part of it, which a lot of people do the first time.
If you’re upset about the test, read Under the Jenfluence’s great entries on her experience studying for and taking the Cicerone exam, especially the one about not passing the test on the first couple tries (that one really helped me while I was wallowing).
After the test, hang out with the other people who took it! Chances are, they are awesome, and they understand what you’ve been going through the past couple months as you prepared.