Pivoting my career?

Spoiler: not just yet.

After obtaining my sommelier diploma it felt like falling into a black hole. Nothingness. Nothing to do on Monday nights. No more blind tastings. No more studying. No more off-flavor training. Help!

As I do like learning, I quickly found out about the Institute of Brewing and Distilling. They offer a wide variety of liquor and beer related courses. From full blown, long-term programs to what they call “Short courses”. On beer, they have two: Beer Sensory Analysis (focused on sensory evaluation panels for breweries, including the set-up and statistics necessary for it) and Beer Recipe Development. They’re advertised as 5-hour courses, but when done seriously they take significantly more time than that (and that’s a good thing). Fun times! I’m almost done with both.

I have also looked at other programs, like at Kiesbye , Doemens, and TU Munich, but very long courses only online are too boring for me (even when they are about beer), and extensive visits to Munich and/or Salzburg are not something that fit well in my life at this point.

One thing I am curious about is the Cicerone program.

There seems to be quite some overlap with the sommelier education I already had, but I can’t seem to put my finger on what the differences are, what the similarities are and at what level of the Cicerone program I would be at, more or less, at this point. That last bit isn’t overly relevant, as when I ant to do it, I’ll have to start from scratch. Certified Beer Server should be relatively easy to finish for me, I would guess, and then it is moving on from there. Too bad I have to spend a lot of money (and time, those exams aren’t necessarily very easy to take from the Netherlands) to figure this out in practice.

If there is somebody who reads this who happens to have gone through both the Kiesbye, Doemens or Siebel Beer Sommelier programs and through the Cicerone program (up to at least level 2: Certified Cicerone): please drop me a line about the relation between the two!

Am I doing all of this to change my career into something more beer related? Not really. Not completely. Not yet. I have a fine day job and intend to keep it. My mortgage, alimony and lifestyle also don’t really support moving from my current job into the low-margin hospitality industry, no matter how much fun that may be. I do some side gigs as a freelancer, though, and I wouldn’t mind moving those more and more in the direction of beer. At the moment I am working out some small ideas for that, so keep an eye out here for announcements!

Image from: beerstocareers.com