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After a torturous few weeks waiting for the results, I FINALLY got official notice that I passed the Institute of Brewing & Distilling General Certificate in Brewing exam! Woohoo!


You might have noticed my posts over the past few months getting even more technical than normal and all of a sudden focused on "how big brewers (REALLY BIG brewers) do it", this is why. The exam is definitely focused on the mega scale and also a bit slanted towards the English brewing tradition but it was still great to force myself to learn some things I might have not bothered to otherwise.

Some of the chapters had instant applicability to home brewing and finally explained the "WHY" behind the "WHAT" where many home brewing books stop; the IBD material also often explains the long-winded and fully accurate "WHY" explanation instead of the abridged home brewer versions although you still get hints that there's still PLENTY of things that the "man behind the curtain" is saving up for the Diploma in Brewing exams.

Chapters 1-9 & 11-13 (Beer Quality: Flavor, Dissolved Oxygen, & Contamination & Infection) are instantly applicable to the "I must know WHY!" home brewer and are a joy to read although the chapters on "Beer Quality and Process Control Systems, Plant Cleaning - Detergents & Sterilants, Clean-in-place systems, Engineering Maintenance (put a fork in my eye please), Water and Effluent, Process Gasses, & Brewing and the Environment" (10 & 14-20) still have some useful things in them, I found them a bit slower going. (Especially Engineering Maintenance Systems; I just gave up on those questions and answered "C" for all of them I think.)


Anyway, highly recommended and IBD lets you download all of the PDFs directly from their site for free, or they'll send you them all zipped up when you register for the exam. Highly recommended reading even if you don't have any desire to ever take the exam.

It's DEFINITELY something that can be done by just downloading the material, printing it out and going through it slowly (making marks where you have questions on terminology or material), and then going back through it all again and looking up the items you are still struggling with. -I certainly found that many of the questions that I had in the first few chapters were answered in the later chapters so even if some of it is a bit frustrating the first time through the second time is wonderful.

I went through a printed copy of the syllabus a week before the exam and then used the items in the syllabus as a "self quiz" and went back to the notes to look up the answers/validate them. <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="www.ibd.org.uk/cms/file/778/gcb-syllabus-version-1-2008-pdf/">www.ibd.org.uk/cms/file/778/gcb- ... -2008-pdf/


A real shame I can't celebrate passing tonight at the B&C(I'm on medication for bacterial infection and can't mix it with alcohol), but next month, I'm there!

If anyone is interested in tackling it and has questions let me know; I've been through the material a few times now and have looked up most of my questions on the material; just don't ask me about the Japanese mechanical maintenance methods...



Adam

Excellent, congratulations!

Well done Adam - another exam for the CV !

Congratulations Adam, Well Done

Now we can look foreward to some really detailled answers to our techie questions <!-- s:D --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_biggrin.gif" alt="" title="Very Happy" /><!-- s:D -->

See you next month at the B&C

Will

Thanks guys!


It's quite anticlimactic and I'm not really sure how to put all that studying to the best use (other than to make better beer), I COULD study for the first module of the diploma but I think it's WAY too much work considering all of the studying and exams my work schedule is laying out ahead of me for the next 8-10 months. So I'm CONSIDERING finally getting over my laziness and writing a blog that STARTS from the IBD material but tries to take it beyond the theory and make it more practical. -I found it quite frustrating to have no one to bounce the ideas off of while studying and it was also frustrating that the "pictures" of the equipment they're talking about are nothing more than black and white drawings that make you really wonder what it looks like in REAL LIFE. (And there are LOADS of undefined abbreviations and terms through out every chapter.) The dreaded brewing calculations are never fully explained; there are examples given without a full explanation of each variable and the units involved; apparently you're just supposed to eventually figure it all out after 4 or 5 examples.

It would be MUCH more useful to have actual pictures of REAL equipment on the equipment bits and actual brewers' experience and opinions on the various topics (and being able to translate a lot of these HUGE, HUGE scale of brewing equipment items and ideas down to the home brewer and micro-brewer level.

I still have this general uneasiness about starting a blog because of trying to keep my professional and beery lives separate, I still don't have a general vision for what direction the blog would take after this project, and I'm not sure I can do updates on a regular enough basis to keep people interested but I definitely wish there would've been some body who had done this when I was studying. I think there's some barriers (possibly intentional barriers) setup to make the move from the world of the home brewer to passing the IBD General Cert exam more difficult than it needs to be, and the only alternatives I see involve taking insanely expensive classes (such as the ones that Diageo hosts and pays for their employees to attend before taking the exam). I'd love to see a free option that's half way in between paying for a hugely expensive class and just downloading the PDFs and doing full self study, and that would be my real driver to finally start a blog.

-I'm also afraid I'd just randomly get some cease and desist letter in the mail from IBD, too so I'm not real clear on how I can and can't use the material. It is almost all available from the website for public consumption and I wouldn't be trying to make any money off of it, just providing free additional discussion on the items but I'm not sure if that's "good enough" or not. Being sued just doesn't sound like too much fun to me...





Adam

Well done Adam.