Rosen students drink up beer serving program

This fall, UCF will be giving students the opportunity to improve their beer palates.

UCF will be offering students the opportunity to take part in the Cicerone Certification Program, a national beer connoisseur program that is the first of its kind in the nation. The school offered this program for the first time last fall, and students can begin taking the course again beginning in August.

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Students are responsible for knowledge in the areas of beer storage and service, popular styles and culture and the brewing process.

Edmund Measom, an adjunct professor at UCF's Rosen School of Hospitality Management, teaches a course called Seminar in Brewing and Quality Beer, which includes the Certified Beer Server exam as its final exam. Measom has been teaching the course for six years, and has been including the exam as part of his course since the Cicerone Certification Program began in 2008.

Measom found his inspiration to teach people about beer when he took a trip as part of an International Studies course when he was a student at Rollins College.

"When I was at Rollins, we went to Germany for the International Studies class. I drank the beer over there and really enjoyed it." Measom said. "When I came back, this was 1991, you couldn't get that imported beer here in Florida. So then I started making my own beer, so that I could have that kind of beer."

Measom said that Cicerone certifications are becoming the standard in many establishments, such as distributorships.

"Distributors are really wanting people to have this because then they know the product that they're selling to the retailers," Measom said.

Measom teaches his course in both the fall and the spring at Rosen, but he currently is teaching an abridged version of his course to employees at the Shipyard Emporium on Fairbanks Avenue. The course involves sampling a variety of beers, such as ales, stouts and lagers. He said that, although beer sampling is part of this course, he monitors the consumption very carefully. He used the example of his course on Saturday to emphasize his point.

"They got one-ounce samples over an hour of time. That's roughly a little more than one beer, and the body can process an ounce of alcohol," Measom said. "It's the equivalent of having one beer over an hour's time."

Ron Raike, a brewer for the Shipyard Brewing Company, assists Measom in teaching his course at the Shipyard Emporium. Raike has been a brewer for 22 years, and said that finding local breweries is much more commonplace than it used to be in earlier years.

"It's like getting your bread from a fresh bakery. You don't have to go to Milwaukee or to Colorado to get your beer. You can get your beer, just like bread, from a local brewery."

Katie Linn, a senior hospitality management major, has taken Measom's course at Rosen. She successfully passed the Cicerone Certification Exam and is now a certified beer server after learning an "incredible" amount of information.

She also took a course in wines to determine if she wanted to become an expert in wine or beer.

"I'm doing the tourism track and I'm very interested in good food, fine wines and good beers, so I also took the wine class as well, just to kind of see if I have the mouth for it, and the taste."

Linn is not planning to move beyond the Certified Beer certification, because her career will be focused outside of the brewery industry.

Mandy Protheroe, a junior advertising and public relations major, is a bartender at the Shipyard Emporium who is enrolled in the summer course at the Shipyard. She said she felt that improving her knowledge of beer would be important to her work.

"When guests come in and they want to know about the beers that you serve, you can't just be like, ‘Oh, I don't know,'" Protheroe said. "I want to be able to have that knowledge and share that so people can learn, too."

Protheroe brews her own beer at home and said that obtaining this certification could possibly help her achieve one of her dreams.

"There's always been that childhood fantasy of mine of opening up a bar, and I guess this definitely would help."