Pub Date [5] – Wedding!

Pub Date

Hi, all! Welcome to back to our new feature called PUB DATE where Estelle from Rather Be Reading, Andi from Andi’s ABCs, and Maggie from Just a Couple More Pages and I all team up to pair books + beers in harmony! Each week, one of us will features a beer and a book of our choice, each with a different theme for that month!

This month’s theme: WEDDING

I am getting married, TOMORROW, people! THIS IS NOT A DRILL. But no, really, I’m extremely excited! I’m really glad to be done with wedding planning because, WHEW, that’s no joke. (And I totally didn’t believe how much work that would be.) It’s been a lot of fun planning my wedding but it’s had its ups and downs and mostly? I’m just exhausted! I’m ready for the big day and spending time with our closest friends and family. I cannot WAIT to share pictures with you too!

I realized the other day that I don’t think I’ve ever written much about my relationship with Shane on my blog and really that’s because I just haven’t written a lot of personal posts. I love keeping it mostly bookish but now that I’ve been blogging for over two years, I’ve gotten to know a lot of my blogging friends really well, even if I haven’t met most of them in person! So today, on the eve of our wedding day, I wanted to share some fun facts about Brittany and Shane!

thankfully someone took a picture on the night we met!

  • We met at a Halloween party in 2010. We don’t exactly remember the date (although talking about it, we realized it was probably the week before Halloween that year) so we just celebrate our dating anniversary on Halloween… except now we will have a wedding anniversary to celebrate! It’s also part of the reason why we chose November 8th as our wedding date. We thought it would be nice to have that anniversary close to/the same as our dating anniversary 🙂
  • At said Halloween party, I was dressed up as Belle from Beauty and the Beast. Shane was dressed as Lenny from Motorhead. We didn’t exactly go together but we clicked right away. (And everyone thought I was dressed up as an Amish person.)
  • On one of our first dates, he took me to his favorite bar/restaurant and I was trying to steal the check from him and accidentally knocked half of a beer into his lap. Thankfully, he laughed!
  • We took our first vacation together when we had only been dating for about seven months. I guess that’s a reasonably long time when you’re in your 20s to go away on a trip together but I was afraid to tell my parents that we were planning a vacation together haha! We went to the mountains of Wyoming (which is a place that’s very special to Shane) and it’s still one of the best vacations we’ve had to date.
  • There were many, many times that I was terrified I scared him away when we first started dating (because I had done this with previous crushes before) but he never left. That was how I knew we would last. He put up with my stupid crap and after he didn’t freak out and never talk to me again — and actually tried to pull me out of those stupid funks — I vowed to quit acting like an idiot and just be cool. It’s one of the ways being with him has changed me for the better, helped me grow up, and really aim to become a better person both for our relationship and for my own well being.
  • We have been on many, many vacations since our first and traveling together really means a lot to us. I can’t wait to see what kind of vacations our future holds!
  • We moved in together in August of 2013 when we bought a house together. I was scared to do this not because I thought something would happen but my parents are very much more traditional. But due to some other things that have happened in our past, my dad was fortunately able to see where we were coming from, why we wanted to move in together, and that we planned on getting engaged in the very near future (at the time when we were buying our house) so he was very supportive and helpful and not at all upset.
  • We got engaged on August 5th, 2013 — the night we moved into our house. I had wanted to get engaged before we moved in together so I was a bit sad that we hadn’t gotten engaged yet, but Shane had it planned out. He popped the question when we were eating pizza and drinking beer on an air mattress on our living room floor (we didn’t have the bed there yet) and it doesn’t sound like anything extravagant or fancy but it was just perfect and very us. I love that it was on the first night we spent in our new house and that it didn’t have to be a crazy, huge gesture to be romantic. It was very romantic in its own way and fit our personalities perfectly since we’ve very low maintenance people!
  • Planning our wedding was probably the most trying part of our relationship so far because we’re just NOT planning people. We like to play things by ear and planning things starts to make things stressful. Despite everything, I think we did a pretty good job! (Although I guess we’ll find out on the wedding day. And I hope to never plan anything of this proportion ever again.) We had a few bumps along the planning road but really only mostly because it’s hard planning things around your family. Those are the places where people are most sensitive so that was to make everyone’s family happy while making ourselves happy too. But just know that no matter what, everything works out in the end!
  • We’re getting married in a very cool antique chapel, full of wooden walls, ceilings, and floors and stained glass windows. It’s the perfect place for us. Our friend (one of Shane’s best friends) is marrying us and I’m so happy to have someone we know and who knows us to perform the ceremony. Our reception hall also has cool wood ceilings and it’s a nice, intimate space. (Well, as intimate as you can get for 200 people!)
  • We’re going to ARUBA on our honeymoon! I’ve never been out of the country except for the Canada side of Niagara Falls so I’m really excited! We’re not HUGE beach people (hey, we needed to go somewhere warm in the middle of November) so we picked Aruba because it seemed like a great place to find things for people like us to do within our budget. I think it’s going to be a great time.

I can’t wait to show you all of the wedding pictures when the honeymoon is over!!! Thank you so much for all of your wonderful love and support throughout the wedding planning process and I can’t thank you enough for all of your warm wedding wishes! <333 I wish I could invite so many blogging friends to the wedding but 200 friends and family was already pushing it 😉 But I do thank you for being there for me as a community when I needed to vent or someone to shout out wedding questions to. The blogging community is a big part of my life and even if you don’t realize it, you helped me plan this wedding too!


My wedding-themed book of choice is THE BRIDE WORE SIZE 12 by Meg Cabot. This is a special book for me in many ways… One is that I started reading the Heather Wells series quite a few years ago because they were some of her favorite books and this series is one of the ones that really got me back into reading again. It’s wedding themed because Heather Wells is getting married and I was THRILLED. It’s a bit of a spoiler if you haven’t read the series yet, I suppose, but you can jump to your own conclusions anyway! It’s also special because I was reading it on my Kindle when Shane and I were in downtown Chicago for the Redbull Flugtag event. I mean, the fact that we were there for Flugtag has nothing to do with it but I can remember where and when I was reading it and the fact that Shane was there and letting me be happy reading instead of just standing around haha. So okay, it’s really not significant at all but somehow it is!

The Heather Wells books are just plain fun and if you’re looking for a light and fluffy adult series, I highly recommend this one! I also hope Meg Cabot writes more because I need to find out what happens AFTER this wedding!

gatecrasher beer

This was wedding central by our front door! Everything that needed to go to the hall + bridesmaid and groomsmen gifts!

I had a bit of a hard time finding a wedding themed beer…? We actually made some beer FOR our wedding but I already featured a homebrew for fall so I didn’t want to bore you with more label-less bottles because what’s the fun in that if you can’t try it? Anyway… I found a beer at Binny’s called Gatecrasher and let’s hope we don’t have any crashers at our wedding! (I actually wouldn’t mind if they were friends who came just for the reception, but no ACTUAL wedding crashers.) Have you ever thought of how hard it is to crash a wedding? That thing would have to be HUGE. I mean, I don’t know ALL of Shane’s family because he has a lot of out-of-town relatives but he knows almost all of mine. I think it’d be very hard to sneak in weddings and go unnoticed!

Anyway. The beer is an IPA and even though I’ve been avoiding the overly hoppy beers, this one actually was not super hoppy. I really enjoyed it! It was a smooth, easy drinker and I actually really enjoyed it! I always like drinking local beers too (this one is from Temperance Beer Co in Evanston, IL) and I also think local beers always taste fresher!

Thanks for joining us for another edition of Pub Date! Missed any posts? You can catch up at any time on my blog page for the Pub Date Feature!


Recent Beers 

  • Lavender Wheat Beer. Homebrew // ABV ?? I was just at one of my best friend’s weddings last weekend and actually one of THEIR friends made a homebrew for the wedding! It was a wheat beer but apparently “dry hopped” (and yes, they had it in quotes too. Why? I don’t know) with lavender, but the lavender taste was SO strong that I was guessing it was more than just dry hopped with it. (Lavender extract, maybe?) It was good but I could only have one because the lavender taste was pretty strong! (And since it was a homebrew and I hadn’t eaten yet, the beer itself was probably a bit high in alcohol content!)
  • Cranberry Ginger Shandy by Leinenkugel’s. Fruit beer // 4.20% ABV. I actually bought this variety pack of shandies because I wanted to try this one. I don’t like cranberries and I don’t like ginger… but somehow this just totally appealed to me. And it was really good! I liked the cranberry because it was a nice fruity flavor without being overly sweet. HOWEVER. The other two beers in this variety pack? NOT GOOD. The Harvest Patch Shandy was was good at first but the spices were so strong that it was hard to finish even one beer. The Old Fashioned Shandy? TERRIBLE. It’s supposed to have oak flavors but it tasted like I was honestly chewing on bark. I ended up pouring it out and I NEVER waste beer.
  • Rapunzel by Arcadia Brewing Company. American Pale Wheat Ale // 6.40% ABV. I bought this one in a make-your-own six pack and I know Arcadia usually had pretty good beers. I really, really enjoyed it! Like I said before, I’ve been kind of avoiding more hoppy beers but I really like American pales versus IPAs because they have a nice hop flavor but aren’t too terribly strong! I’d recommend this one.

** Beer styles and alcohol content from Beer Advocate **
** Drink responsibly ** 

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Hi, I'm Brittany!
Hi, I'm Brittany!

I'm an avid reader, candle-maker, and audiobook lover! Here you'll find book reviews, fun blog posts, and my other loves of photography & craft beer!

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14 thoughts on “Pub Date [5] – Wedding!

  1. Alexa S.

    Late on commenting on this post, but it’s so wonderful that you’ve chosen to share a little bit more with us about you + Shane! Congratulations again on your wedding, and wish y’all many, many, many more wonderful years together to come <3

    Reply
  2. Stephanie

    CONGRATS BRITTANY!!!!
    So exciting and I am so happy for you and Shane! What a wonderful post. I couldn’t help but smile while reading it. (And I totally got that you were Belle from just looking at the picture before reading that part!)
    I hope that today is wonderful and that you both have the best time on your honeymoon (which I am sure will happen with both!)
    You will be a beautiful bride! I can’t wait to see pictures!
    Congratulations and Best Wishes!

    Reply
  3. Tammy

    Thanks for sharing your love story! I’m loving all the pictures of your wedding prep being posted on Instagram and I can’t wait to see your wedding/honeymoon photos. Congratulations to you and Shane!

    Reply
  4. Kay

    CONGRATS!! Have a wonderful wedding. Remember to enjoy it and take it all in. It only happens once. 🙂

    I love those Meg Cabot books. I hope she writes many more. I can’t get enough of Heather.

    Reply
  5. Kritika

    MY GRIN IS TOO BIG FOR MY FACE. This post is so adorable!
    Is it too early to say congratulations? Congratulations anyway! I hope you both have a fantastic married life 🙂

    Reply
  6. Valeria @ A Touch of Book Madness

    Your huge day is finally here! This is so exciting! I hope everything goes according to plan and that you enjoy yourself like you never have. I could totally relate with your concerns about moving in with Shane, because my parents are just like that so I would be afraid too. It took me a year with my actual boyfriend before we went on a trip together, because I was terrified to tell my parents about it. And I can’t believe people didn’t get your Belle costume!!! When I saw it I was like, she’s dressed like Belle, so this must be a costume party. It is actually a great costume!

    Reply
  7. Andi

    I LOVE LOVE LOVE this post! I really can’t say anything more than that. Congrats to you both and I just know you will be very happy together.

    Reply
  8. Kelsey

    The best of luck to you with your wedding! I remember mine being amazing and I don’t regret anything, so just stay as calm as possible and enjoy it 🙂 You guys sounds like a cute couple and I hope you have the best day!
    Unfortunately I don’t like beer, but these posts are interesting! I think I missed when you started them while I was on a slump.

    Reply

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