Ben Ripani likes to talk about beer, but not in a geeky, ostentatious way.
Nick Bumgardner
He can go there, for sure, but he’s honed his understated approach after years of working in restaurants and at craft breweries in his native Chicago, and now in Nashville.
Ripani is the craft beer curator, or cicerone, at Noelle, a boutique hotel downtown on 4th Avenue North. That role includes choosing the rotating list of frothy barley beverages served at the lobby and rooftop bars, stocking the in-room mini-fridges, and minding the list of bottles, cans, and taps at the lower level restaurant, Makeready Libations & Liberation.
Nick Bumgardner
Ben Ripani
If you’ve never heard of a cicerone (sis-uh-rohn), you’re not alone. While it sounds like an Italian cocktail, and is supposedly derived from the name of the great Roman orator, it was long an English term for mentors and guides with a deep understanding of antiquities.
Legendary beer guru and author Ray Daniels created a certification program around the name to help train members of the hospitality industry, most notably servers and bartenders, in the wiles and vagaries of beer, from storage to glassware to hops and yeast.
The cicerone program has grown to the point where it’s widely recognized within the hospitality industry but is not as well-known as a sommelier might be to someone outside of the food and beverage world. That’s changing as hotels now embrace the term as a job title and something to put on their menus as a mark of credibility.
Ripani is quick to dispel any notions of pretension.
“You can’t tell people what they are tasting, or what to drink,” he says, adding that it’s best to talk to the customer to find out what they like and then pair them with something along those lines. Stating the obvious, he jokes, “You don’t want to give someone a beer they don’t like. It’s the worst thing you can do but it happens a lot.”
Nick Bumgardner
In addition to launching an ambitious program of beer-pairing dinners, Ripani has expanded the list to appeal to both sophisticated travelers as well as local aficionados that respect a thoughtful mix that includes lesser-known brands and seven seasonal taps. He will regularly swap out the draft beers and ciders so he can offer a local snapshot of what local brewers are up to at any given time.
Currently Ripani has 40 bottled and canned beers broken down into local, regional, and global categories. Among the usual suspects he has some selections that he considers more “intriguing,” like Brouwerij Bosteels Tripel Karmeliet from Belgium.
Ultimately, for Ripani, it’s a balancing act of wooing the local beer community while at the same time giving the upscale tourists a beer program that both excites and gives them a sense of place.
Makeready Libations & Liberation,615-610-7835; makereadynash.com