Our Masters of Beer Appreciation, that is. Which is Goose Island's "drink a bunch of our beer, get some stuff" program. You can only do the drinking at Goose Island's two brew pubs and they have to be different beers each time to count, so it's actually taken us over three years. In fact, we started under a different version of the program -- they used to have just a checklist of all their beers. The brewers have gotten more creative over the years, so now it's a booklet with blank spaces. We've earned free growlers along the way, but now that we completed our booklets we got t-shirts and we'll get our names on a plaque at the Clybourn location. That's what Erica has really been excited about the whole time. It'll be a little while before they're up, but we're looking forward to going back and seeing our names in gleaming bronze.

I'm also nearing my Legendary Badge on Untappd -- I've had 484 of the 500 unique beers I'll need to earn that badge. It's been quite a journey and I've tasted plenty of beers I never would have tried before -- in both the good and bad senses. After some kind gifts from friends and my last visit to Binny's, I probably have 16 different beers in the house right now. Next weekend we're doing a triathlon in Wisconsin, but maybe the weekend after that I'll just dive in and finish the thing off in one terrible day.

(We both look so put together because we went for our first open-water swim of the season just before going to Goose Island.)