Thanksgiving is a weird holiday – it’s basically like a dress rehearsal for how everyone is going to get along at Christmas. This year, why not shake things up a little by pairing beer with your Thanksgiving dinner?

When you spend a lot of time looking at brewery websites like I do, you find yourself consistently running into a delay that seems to be different for each website: being asked if you’re at least 21 years old before being allowed to enter the website.

Researching the different age gates and reading about the self-regulation led me to a tantalizing thought: what happens when you indicate that you are not 21 years old?

Being able to visualize what kinds of ingredients are in my beer adds to my enjoyment of it. It's sort of like when you see the music video for a song you like in that the next time you hear that song, you'll have an image of the song being performed. 

Obviously, beer is a very big part of my life as well as my husband's life. Beer was thing we bonded over first - we're both kind of socially awkward but talking about beer came easily to both of us. When it came time to plan our wedding, it would have been hard not to incorporate it into our wedding. However, as even the most minimal Pinterest perusal will show you, incorporating beer into your wedding requires a delicate touch.

If you read my latest I Tried It about Walmart’s private label beer, then you’ll recall that Walmart’s beer is contract brewed by a company called Trouble Brewing. Contract brewing is when a company brews and packages its beer using equipment it does not own and comes in a few forms. In cases such as Walmart’s, finding out more about the contract brewery - Trouble Brewing, in this particular case - sometimes proves to be a Nancy Drew-level mystery.

In a little over six months, I’ll go to the Cicerone Certification Program offices in Chicago, where I’ll sit for the day-long exam. The Advanced Cicerone exam will cover a subset of the information within the Master Cicerone exam and will have the same sections tested on each Cicerone level exam: keeping and serving beer; beer styles; beer flavor and evaluation; beer ingredients and brewing processes; and pairing beer with food.

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.

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. 

After offering refunds for off flavors in its 2015 Bourbon County Brand Coffee Stout and Barleywine, Goose Island identified the cause of the tainted beers: Lactobacillus acetetolerans, a rare form of bacteria first classified in the 1980s.