Beer Judge Certification Program

Learning About Beer: Becoming a Certified Cicerone®

[Ed. Note: Earlier this month I introduced you to the Beer Judge Certification Program and mentioned that Lindsay from Love Beer, Love Food would be covering the Certified Cicerone Program. If you enjoy her article here, please follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and her blog. I promise she’s got loads of great beer & food info. – Tom]

Hey there! I’m Lindsay, and I write a website called Love Beer, Love Food which is all about beer, home brewing, and cooking. Since I am a Certified Cicerone®, Tom asked me to come onto his lovely site here and explain more about the Cicerone program. As Tom mentioned, there are actually two kinds of ‘beer experts’ out there – Certified Beer Judge, which Tom recently achieved (hooray!), and Certified Cicerone® (pronounced sis-uh-rohn).

Learning About Beer: Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP)

In the world of beer, there are a few organizations that focus on certifying folks on their knowledge of beer. The big two are the Cicerone Certification Program (just called Cicerone) and the Beer Judge Certification Program (abbreviated BJCP). The primary difference between the two is in their focus. Cicerones focus on restaurants and serving craft beer while BJCP focuses on judging homebrew competitions. BJCP is also an all-volunteer organization while Cicerone is a private for-profit company.

I’m proud to say that I was recently certified as a Recognized level Beer Judge. I wanted to take a few minutes to tell you about it while my certified Cicerone friend Lindsey from Love Beer, Love Food will have a guest post for us on that soon.

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Smart phone apps

I do most of my beer related-internet stuff from my phone, and more recently my tablet. That said I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time and I figured now is a better time then most since many fellow beer lovers may have gotten a tablet or new smart phone for ChristmaHanaKwanzika. First off though this list isn’t exclusive to smart phones/tablets. All of these apps have related websites, which I still use frequently when I’ve had too many beers to work the tiny keyboard on my phone. Right, so the following are kind of in order of importance (at least importance to me).

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