How to become a Beer Sommelier (Part One)
There are a whole range of qualifications that pubs can put their staff through to improve their knowledge, from online e-learning courses to practical cask cellaring training.
The Morning Advertiser has teamed up with The Beer & Cider Academy to discover what dividends putting your staff through its training could bring to your pub, and to document the journey to becoming a qualified Beer Sommelier.
The Beer & Cider Academy has various different levels of training available, depending on the level of knowledge you want to equip your staff with, but applicants cannot undertake the Beer Sommelier examination before first passing the Foundation, Advanced and How to Judge Beer Courses.
The Foundation and Advanced courses, however, are qualifications in their own right that can be extremely useful training tools to ensure that staff can inform and educate beer-curious customers.
Here’s what we learnt on the Foundation Course.
The basics
You’d hope that bar staff would already have a pretty good grasp of what the liquid they are selling to customers is. Nonetheless, a refresher of the basic ingredients and their impact on flavour is a nice introduction to the course. Learning to distinguish between the different beer ‘families’ (ales, lagers and mixed fermentation beers) and the many styles and sub-styles is essential for bar staff to be able to talk confidently about the products on your bar.
Beer through the ages
OK, so the history of beer is hardly essential knowledge for your average bartender. Nonetheless, if you’re hoping to host beer-themed events at your venue, knowing about the origins of particular styles is a nice way to impress your customers and add value. There are also a number of useful little facts that may come in handy when dealing with particularly inquisitive drinkers, such as how and why the Reinheitsgebot (purity law) became enshrined into German law, and the rise (and fall) of the Black IPA.
Food’s perfect partner
The Foundation course in beer doesn’t go into too much depth on the subject of food and beer matching, but it does a great job of explaining the basics of co-ordinating, cleansing, complementing and contrasting matches, and the importance of presentation in terms of using the correct glassware. The interactive lunch session also gives attendees the chance to try out their own pairings and see what works best for them. A handy tool for any pub looking to spruce up its food menu.
The brewing process
Covering the five key areas (malting, brewing, fermentation, maturation and packaging), the segment of the Foundation course dedicated to the brewing process will leave staff in no doubt as to exactly how beer gets from grain to glass. The packaging part of this section is likely to be the most useful to bar staff, teaching them the importance of cold chain distribution and storage in order to preserve a beer’s flavour and condition over the entirety of its shelf life.
Join us next month, as we take on the Beer & Cider Academy Advanced Course in Beer.
