What cups does Cicerone® use on exams?

If you want to practice with the EXACT cups used by the Cicerone Certification Program for their tasting exams, these are the ones you want. As of mid-2024 they're using Fineline Savvi Serve 408-CL 8 oz. Tall Clear Hard Plastic Tumbler cups. You can get packs of 500 of them on Webstraunt or on Amazon.

There are also 5 oz versions which are slightly less expensive, but skip those, they're too squat for getting a decent sniff of your samples.

Here's some more advice:

• When you're practicing for your exam, make sure you have lots of plastic cups on hand, or use tasting glasses made of glass.
• If you get another kind of plastic cups, make sure they don't smell of plastic-y phenols. If you got smelly ones, that sucks, but you have to ditch them and get new ones.
• Make sure whatever cups you use are relatively small. 8 oz is perfect. You definitely don't want to practice with anything akin to the giant Solo cups for doing sensory because you can't really get your nose in those for great sniffs.
• Your proctor should only be pouring you 2-3 ounces of each spike so you're doing your tasting practice under exam-like conditions.
• Also, if you're putting together an off flavor tasting practice run for a sizable group, make sure you have a bunch of cheap pitchers to use to mix the spikes with the beer and to then pour into the sample cups from.

If you want to quickly level up your tasting and descriptive skills, plus learn all about the many beer styles out there, get enrolled in the Beer Scholar Course for the Certified Cicerone® Exam. Founder Chris Cohen, Advanced Cicerone® and National BJCP beer judge, runs weekly style tastings and Q&As for his community of enrolled students. Some people have crushed the Certified Cicerone exam after just one month in the course, but anyone can do it with just a few months of effort, plus you'll learn TONS about beer! You get recorded lessons covering the entire CC syllabus, videos on every beer style, excellent flashcards, and membership to the Beer Scholar online community. If you don't pass the CC exam after going through the program, Chris will give you your money back – it's that effective.