Beer bloggers never drink a bad beer.

On the contrary. I drink a lot of bad beer. I just don't tell people about it. 

Like a lot of beer nerds, I fall partially into most of these types and have met all of these types. Confession: I have a bottle of 2014 Bourbon County Proprietor's that I keep in case I want to trade it but will probably never trade it because then I won't have it anymore.

I probably won't drink it either because I don't particularly care for the taste of it, which I know is probably sacrilege to the Mr. Groupthink's out there who say that 2014 Prop has a 100% rating on Beer Advocate and RateBeer.

Here’s the thing: if you’re a regular craft beer drinker, you get it. You get that your beer choice can be high in calories but maybe choose not to think about it too much.

I’ve made my choice: I can be 15-20 pounds lighter or I can drink all the beer I want and generally eat well, but occasionally dip fried foods in ranch dressing and/or sometimes make totchos for dinner. Sometimes even dip said totchos in ranch dressing. Life is all about choices, people, and I choose to cover life in beer, melted cheese, and sometimes ranch dressing.

Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has developed a hulled barley with ultra-low levels of gluten that has won the designation as the first World Health Organization (WHO)-approved "gluten-free" barley, known as Kebari barley.

The statistics don't necessarily tell the entire story and need to be sussed out a little. According to Nielsen data, craft beer sales have increased by 6% this year. Two years ago, craft beer sales increased by 19%. The market share of the top 10 craft brewers has slipped to 39%, from 50%.

But wait, the number of craft breweries in the U.S. increased 14% between 2014 and 2015. But if craft beer is declining, how are the number of craft breweries increasing?

If you don't like the first or second or even third sour beer you drink, I encourage you to keep exploring different sour styles because there is such a variety out there.

With great facts such as Harvard's benefactor, John Harvard, rumored to have learned how to brew from William Shakespeare, this book promises to be entertaining and educational. I already have it in my Audible queue and am now kind of excited to go to work so I can start listening to it.

My favorite term for a hangover is the jim-jams. So let’s say you find yourself with the jim jams. What do you do? Like hiccups, most people have their own “cure” for a hangover. Here’s the deal: there is no cure or remedy for a hangover. The only remedy is time, i.e. your hangover is probably going to be your whole day. However, there are several things you can do to lessen the effects of your hangover.

Jeff Shrag, President of the Missouri Small Brewers Association and co-owner of Mother's Brewing Company, summed it up perfectly: "This is about the slow annihilation of craft beer in America. They are going to do it by a thousand tiny cuts."

Is sponsorship such as this co-branding agreement good for the underfunded park service? Or will we end seeing the Grand Canyon brought to us by Budweiser? Or the Statue of Liberty's torch replaced by an "America" can?

Unsurprisingly, 15 of the top 20 beers on Zymurgy's list are IPAs or Pale Ales. Enough with the IPAs already, people. Expand your drinking repertoire, please. There is a whole wide world of beer out there that isn't all hop bombs. 

People have asked why I was taking the Cicerone exam and what I hoped to get out of it. I’m not in any industry at all where a Cicerone certification is particularly useful beyond impressing people and saving time trying to prove my beer knowledge to people who dismiss me or don’t take me seriously, usually because I’m a woman and/or they assume I “like” beer because my husband does.

Beer is not just something I drink and rarely has been – it’s living history, a seemingly endless educational opportunity, and a way to bond with people and places, however unlikely. One of my great joys in life is thinking about and experiencing the perfect beer to capture a day, a mood, a feeling, an occasion, a place. 

I’ve heard and read a lot of stuff about what you should do and should not do the morning of the exam: don’t eat, don’t drink coffee, don’t smoke, don’t wear perfume. I’m a brat when it comes to being hungry. My day is 15% eating snacks and 85% worrying I may be too far away from snacks at any given time, so not eating the morning of the exam was not an option for me.

A word of warning: as great as American craft beer is, I would buy the commercial examples listed in the BJCP Guidelines rather than buying an American craft version of a style because there is a high likelihood that an American craft beer that purports to be a style like an ESB is probably not going to be the best way to train your palate and brain to recognize the classic beer style.

Beyond the expense of the exam itself the other costs can up quickly. However, the good news is that if you don’t have a lot of cash to throw around, it’s still completely possible to have all the study materials you need for next to nothing.

My road to Cicerone was a long one full of hard work, failure, and self discovery. In this series of posts, I'll talk about how I approached the exam, the resources I used, how I conducted tastings, how the day of the exam went for me, and what I learned along the way. 

"I came in a fan and I'm leaving a fan."

I've enjoyed beers from all 10 of these breweries, but have only visited two. Which ones have you been to? Which ones would you like to go to?

You don't have to look very hard to find multiple examples of shady behavior by AB InBev similar to the ones described here.

It's possible that antitrust authorities will approve the $107 billion merger between Anheuser Busch INBEV and SABMiller by the end of the month.