Beer Hall Beer Training

Everards Brewery has the opportunity to showcase all of their products in the Beer Hall. As their flagship pub, it is a place where fans of Everards beer can come and taste around 20 of their beers at any one time. It is valuable for the Beer Hall staff to be confident and knowledgeable about the beer styles the brewery produces so they can communicate effectively and make recommendations to customers. While it would be unreasonable to expect staff to memorise every beer on the bar and its tasting notes, it is practical to provide them with the building blocks to understand beer styles and help guide customers. These training sessions are limited by time, so I have created a crash course for beer styles using a Powerpoint to serve as a visual aid. I also used samples of malt and hops so they can experience first-hand the complexities of these ingredients used in brewing. We discuss how these different ingredients are used to create different beer styles. In addition, we also talked about basic beer and food pairing guidelines to help them with recommendations to customers. I really like using Mark Dredge's approach to pairings using the 3 Bs: bridge, boost, balance. I am grateful that the Everards Beer Hall team has asked me to provide beer training sessions for the staff during their quarterly training days. This was one of the most rewarding parts of my job, so I hope I will have more opportunities in the future to keep spreading beer knowledge, understanding, and love to more people.