From brewers and buyers, to bartenders and bottle shop workers, there is an increasing need for staff to be educated on the broad range of beer styles now available to them. And there are a raft of benefits that come with it, too, explains WSET Beer Educator Natalya Watson.
With the global drinks landscape continuing to develop and evolve, it’s never been more important for those of us working with beer to stay on top of trends and to sharpen our knowledge and skills to help contribute to the industry’s ongoing development and success.
More premium products and a broader range of beer styles have become available on the bar over the last few years, leading to a greater interest from customers and therefore an increased need for staff – from brewers and buyers, to bartenders and bottle shop workers – to be educated on these products alongside the wider world of beer and brewing.
From accurately describing flavour profiles to making recommendations and serving drinks correctly, a well-rounded knowledge of beer is key.
Product knowledge isn’t the only benefit from beer training though. Staff that are equipped with the right know-how are more engaged with your brand, more confident with your products, and more likely to stay with your organisation.
But given these benefits, why aren’t we seeing more businesses invest in beer education? There are of course a variety of factors at play here, but two key points to consider.
The first is that, for probably too long, drinks education has primarily been associated with the world of wine and spirits.
For whatever reason, many have considered beer to have played ‘second fiddle’ to other types of drinks when it comes to being able to learn about it in greater depth.
Secondly, while there have been training programmes and formal qualifications available to the beer industry, what’s on the market today isn’t meeting the industry’s needs. Why?
Much of the available training is brand-led, meaning it focuses more on brand stories and tasting notes for a specific set of beers, not on general product knowledge and tasting skill development. Additionally, the formal qualifications out there have typically been targeted to specific job roles, are quite advanced, and often require candidates to prepare through self-study, without any educator support.
Fortunately, that’s all changed, as a new approach to beer education is now on offer and it’s already making a massive impact on the industry – the WSET Level 1 & Level 2 Awards in Beer.
The world’s leading provider of drinks education, WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust) has over 55 years of experience in the industry. You may not be familiar with WSET though, because until last year, we exclusively offered qualifications in wine, spirits and sake.
Noticing the above trends, we decided to develop beer qualifications to fill the gap in what was currently available on the market.
We carried out in-depth consultancy with sensory and technical experts on the content and applied our own teaching knowhow, before launching our new beer qualifications in February 2024.
As with all WSET qualifications, our beer courses are designed to improve a students’ product knowledge, tasting skills, and professional confidence. (They’re intended to be fun, too!)
WSET’s new beer qualifications cover topics like beer’s ingredients and the brewing process, the principles of storage, service and food pairing, and beer style characteristics.
Our Level 1 course is a beginner level qualification that focuses on the foundations of these topics and includes 20 key beer styles.
Level 2 is intermediate-level and covers these topics in greater detail, including over 60 different beer styles and specialty beers. In WSET structure, Level 1 is not a requirement for Level 2.
From accurately describing flavour profiles to making recommendations and serving drinks correctly, a well-rounded knowledge of beer is key,” Natalya Watson, WSET
In addition to the theory, WSET courses also focus on the development of tasting skills. We use our unique Systematic Approach to Tasting Beer to enable candidates to calibrate their palates and develop their ability to taste, describe and assess the quality of beer.
We then connect the flavours found in the glass with the ingredient or process choices that introduce them, in what we call linking theory to tasting. Our mission is to empower people with inspiring learning experiences all over the world.
By the end of the course, students will be able to make product recommendations, answer customer questions, and taste and describe any beer on the bar with confidence.
With decades of experience in the drinks education space, we’ve honed our expertise in delivering drinks training.
Our courses are taught by rigorously trained expert educators. We provide course materials that cover all examinable content so students can feel confident that they’re exam-ready.
We’ve designed our qualifications with multiple industry roles in mind – from service, sales and marketing, to production and finance – to deliver brand-neutral product knowledge and tasting training for everyone on your team.
Lastly, we meet your team where they are. Our courses are available both in-person or online, and you can start with our beginner- or intermediate-level qualification, depending on your team’s current level of beer knowledge and confidence.
We’ve trained the Sales team from Asahi UK, Heineken UK’s Marketing team, front of house staff at the Guinness Storehouse and Open Gate Brewery, alcohol-free beer brand Lucky Saint, and many more individual hospitality professionals and enthusiasts.
Of the candidates trained so far, the vast majority have agreed that WSET’s beer qualifications improved their product knowledge, tasting skills, and beer confidence, and strongly agreed that they had fun while learning.
Training benefits your team – and your business – with so much more than product knowledge. It’s been demonstrated to increase customer service, profitability, productivity, staff retention, and self-esteem.
And the perfect training solution for the beer industry is now available from WSET: courses and qualifications that deliver product knowledge and tasting skills, for those totally new to beer or who are looking to deepen their understanding, offered in-person or online, and for teams of any size.
