[THC] BJCP exam (here?), in the early spring, study course starting after Thanksgiving....

[Rick Westerman]

    Studying beer is lots of work.  Last year I spent about as much 
"book time" during the study period as I would have for a Purdue 
for-credit course.    However beer study is also lots of fun and 
becoming a beer judge is very satisfying ... if nothing else having 
passed the exam I can now bore non-beer geeks to death.  :-)    If 
any one is at all interested in beer (as most of us are) and has the 
time and desire to improve his/her knowledge to a different level of 
understanding then the BJCP course is a good investment of time and money.

     I should point that the cost will undoubtedly be more than the 
$50 that Linda mentioned but should be less than $125.   $25 has to 
go to the exam fee and since we need a minimum number of people in 
order to hold a exam then we need to make that fee 
non-refundable.  The per-session supply fee (mainly for beer) will 
likely be somewhere between $5-$10/session (this is what Ron Smith in 
Indy charges and is in line with what we spent during our 2005-06 
study group) and so with about 12 sessions the supply cost should be 
$60-$120.  Linda is only going to collect $50 up-front (for the exam 
fee and about a month's worth of study sessions) and then will 
collect more supply fees later from whomever is still in the study 
group at that time.  In our 2005-06 group we started with 6 people 
but later dropped down to 4 people; it would have been unfair to 
collect the entire supply fee up-front and so we did not do 
so.  Ditto for this year's study group.



-- 
Rick