You have already gotten some good advice, but I’d like to add some comments on beer and lifting coming from the perspective of someone who started lifting just last year. Prior to that I did a whole lot of sitting on my ass chugging beer.
- Beer and lifting. The beginning lifter, if previously sedentary, can still drink beer and gain muscle while losing fat, at least in the first few months. It is NOT at all optimal for most health and fitness goals, but if you and your wife are ready to start hitting the gym but not quite ready to put down the beer then by all means, pick up a barbell and crack open a cold one when you get home. I drank LOTS of beer in my first year of training and still somehow managed to lose over 40 lbs and get a LOT stronger in the process.
I’m sure I would have done much better had I not been putting a six pack away most nights, but I sure as hell made a lot of progress in spite of that. It is worthwhile to note that my diet was quite good, with the very notable exception of beer, so I was getting sufficient nutrition to actually make muscle gains. The beer was just wasted calorie intake on top of that. Your mileage may vary, of course, but having some cold ones and getting into lifting are not mutually exclusive.
- Consistency of exercise. If you are really interested in a lasting change, you will probably need to reprogram some of your behavior patterns. You may want to work on achieving some sort of consistency with the time you put into the gym and the level of effort you put forward while you are there. That’s what I did last year, and I was chugging beer the whole time. To be clear - I drank AFTER my workouts. Putting down a 6 pack and doing a set of 300 lb squats is a Darwin award waiting to happen.
Not worrying about fixing my beer consumption allowed me to focus on changing how I spent my time on a day-to-day basis, specifically by prioritizing my MWF weight training sessions. One year later I am all but automatic with my workouts and lifting is something I really look forward to. My big focus this year is achieving consistency of diet, which includes cutting beer out of my daily calorie intake.
Of course, your mileage may vary. This is just what has been working for me. I prioritized lifting, and everything else has been falling into place around that, slowly but surely.
Here’s a link to my log. I’m still doing the same basic lifts that I started with (compound barbell movements done full-body 3x/week, very similar to what BJK advocated).