Ramblings of a Beer Runner

Numerous Raffle Prizes Await Beer Runners at the 3rd Annual SF Beer Week Beer Run

2012-02-01T21:30:00.000-08:00

As if going for a run in Golden Gate Park and then enjoying a great beer at a dollar discount from Social Kitchen and Brewery wasn't enough, they'll be plenty of prizes to win in the 3rd Annual SF Beer Week Beer Run post-run charity raffle to benefit Autism Speaks and the Contra Costa Food Bank in honor of beer writer Bill Brand. The run starts February 12th, 2012 at 11:00 am, beginning and ending at Social Kitchen and Brewery, 1326 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94122. Click here for location.

The generous response from both the brewing and running community has been overwhelming, and we're pleased to announce the following prizes they've made available to several lucky participants.

Social Kitchen and Brewery, which is hosting this official SF Beer Week event will provide a $50 gift certificate to a lucky winner.

On the Run Shoes, located just down the street from Social Kitchen, will provide a pair of Brooks running shoes.

Adventure Sports Journal will provide "Earn Your Beer" t-shirts and other swag.

Additional running gear prizes will be provided by Nike.

Beer run co-founders Bryan Kolesar and Brian Yeager were able to scare up prizes from breweries from their respective cities of Philadelphia and Portland, with the following breweries have denoted prizes in the form of glassware, clothing, trinkets, and yes, beer.

Participating East Coast Breweries
Harpoon (Boston)
Ommegang/Duvel (Upstate NY / Belgium)
Philadelphia Brewing Co. (Philly)
Dock Street (Philly)
Sly Fox (Philly 'burbs):
Troegs (Pa.)
Iron Hill (Pa. NJ, Del.)
Victory (Philly 'burbs)
Participating Portland Area Breweries
BridgePort
Laurelwood
Migration
Widmer Bros.

And Trumer Brauerei of Berkeley, CA will be throwing in some Frisbees.

Raffle ticket are a dollar each, five dollars will get you 6 tickets, and $20 will get you 25 tickets.

In the words of the late Bill Brand, "I'll see you there."

No Longer Home Brewing Behind Closed Doors

2012-01-30T16:00:00.000-08:00

Brewing up a one gallon batch

Whenever I would tell my wife I would be home brewing over the coming weekend, there would be an awkward pause, and then realizing there was not much she could do about it, she'd respond with a quiet "OK". She'd arrange to meet up with her friends for the day while I'd do my business, and when she was on her way back that evening, would give me a call to warn me of her impending arrival. I'd get everything cleaned up and put back so by the time she got home, she would have no idea what had actually happened while she was away, although there would always be some tell tale evidence if she looked closely. Of course, she knew what really went on when she went away, but was wise enough not to ask too many questions.

OK, granted my wife is quite supportive of my brewing exploits, but understands it's best if she isn't around. Our apartment kitchen gets pretty trashed whenever I brew up the standard 5-gallon home brew batch and I'd tend to get in a foul mood one or twice or three times brewing all that beer in cramped quarters. My wife doesn't like watching our place get trashed and knows to get as far away from me as possible whenever I'm in foul mood.

And while brewing sounds like a pretty romantic activity, it's a lot about cleaning and sanitizing large metal and glass objects which I find about as exciting as cleaning the toilet. And cleaning up the kitchen after I've splashed and spilt wort all over it is about as thrilling as, you guess it, cleaning up a dirty kitchen.

So after reading about brewing more manageable 1-gallon batches I set about brewing my first 1-gallon batch with a cautious optimism, choosing to brew a Honey Sage Ale recipe from the Brooklyn Brew Shop Beer Making Book .

Predictably, I screwed up recipe from the get go. It called for using 1.8 lbs of Pilsner Malt and 0.3 lbs of Munich malt. I picked up what I thought were two 1-pound bags of Pilsner malt at my favorite home brew store, only to find out when I got home that I had actually picked up a one pound of Pilsner malt and a one pound of Rahr Malted Wheat. Luckily, this mistake was partially cancelled out by another mistake, in that I also picked up Belgian Wit Ale Yeast rather than Belgian Ale Yeast, since Wit beers are brewed with wheat malt. Despite seriously deviating from the original receipe, the end result could be no worse than any of my previous brews.

Nice clean stove to brew beer on

So the final recipe turned out to be:

1 lb Pilsner malt
0.6 lb Munich Malt
0.5 lb Rahr Malted White Wheat
3/4 cup California Wildflower Honey
0.2 lb Cane Sugar

0.3 ounce East Kent Golding hops
3 tablespoons chopped fresh sage

Belgian Wit Ale Yeast

Mash the grains with 2 1/2 quarts water between 144-152 F for 60 minutes. After sparging with an additional 1 gallon of water at 170F, boil for 1 hour adding 0.1 ounce of hops at initial boil, another 0.1 ounce at 30 minutes, and the last 0.1 ounce at 55 minutes. Add 2 tablespoons of the sage at 30 minutes and the last tablespoon at 60 minutes. Add the honey and cane sugar at 60 minutes, and stir to dissolve.

Ferment for two weeks, and then add 3 tablespoons of honey for priming.

Original Gravity 1.070
Final Gravity 1.008

The Honey Sage Belgian Wit in all its glory

abv = 8.0%

After fermenting for two weeks, the sage and honey flavors were quite forward, with a definite boozy character to the brew from high alcohol content. Two weeks of bottle conditioning mellowed things significantly. The final result was a fizzy cloudy yellow unassuming looking wit beer with plenty of herbal sage flavors, some yeastiness, and a little savory and floral character from the wildflower honey and hops. Despite the high abv, the alcohol was not longer apparent, and I didn't detect any obvious off-flavors.

It only took about four hours to brew from start to finish, with a lot less before and after prep work than the 5-gallon batches I've made previously. And the result was something pretty refreshing to drink during a Northern California "winter" and arguably the best beer I've ever brewed, even though I screwed up the initial recipe pretty bad.

Which underlines a key difference between running and brewing. If you screw up running, some part of your body is going to feel pretty sore. Screw up home brewing and chances are still good you'll have a decent beer when it's all over.

Proudly Introducing Ales for Autism

2012-01-19T15:00:00.000-08:00

As a father of an autistic child, I can assure you that beer and autism go together. And while sometimes a beer or two is needed to get through the stress and strain of raising a child with autism, what families with an autistic child really need is a support structure they can depend on to help them navigate the difficult moments.  And since over 1 out of 150 children born in this country are eventually diagnosed with autism, someone you know is probably dealing with this.

Which is why Greg Coll recently founded Ales for Autism, a non-profit organization based in Sonoma County to raises money for autism care centers, schools, and research facilities. With his niece and nephew both diagnosed with autism, Greg saw firsthand the serious challenges autism creates for young families. Greg once belonged to an informal organization that provided DJ services for parties and events and currently works for a beer distributorship in Sonoma County. Coupling his DJ experiences with his beer connections, Greg found a way to create events that show case the best West Coast breweries while benefiting families dealing with autism.

"At the end of DJ'ing a party, people would come up tell me what a great evening they had, and it felt really satisfying," explains Greg. "I wanted to create something like that while helping those dealing with autism."  Ales for Autism's inaugural event will be the Black and White Beer Ball held February 17th in Winsor, CA as part of San Francisco Beer Week. The event features both dark and white beers from leading West Coast breweries including Russian River, Lagunitas and Ninkasi Brewing. So while you won't find any brown, amber, red, or green beer their that evening, you will first a tasty variety of stouts, black IPAs, black lagers, wit beers, lagers, and other beers fitting the unique format.

"The brewing community has been really supportive," adds Greg. "Craft breweries have enjoyed a lot of success lately, and have been great about giving back to the community."  Santa Rosa's BBQ Spot will be serving food while The Nate Lopez Trio will provide the music.

So what's next for Ales for Autism? With April being Autism Awareness month, Greg has a couple events in the works he's not ready to discuss yet. But when he is, you can be sure I'll let you know about it here.

In Praise of NBC's Olympic Marathon Trials Coverage

2012-01-15T14:48:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I watched a televised marathon when I turned on NBC to see the United State Olympic Trials Marathon. What I watched was shocking.  The actually covered the race.

So many times I've watched marathons on TV where the coverage seemed to be going out of their way to cover something other than the actual race. They would cut away from the race to show human interest stories of the neighborhoods the course was running through or some cancer survivor entering finishing in the mid-pack. While those stories have their own merit and can be inspiring in their own way, can you imagine the coverage of a football game to be interrupted to show a cancer survivor playing touch football in the stadium parking lot? Of course not. The focus in on the game. The human interest are for another time and place.

Now of course, the men's and women's fields were open only to Olympic Trial qualifiers, so there couldn't be any human interest stories of mid-packers. But maybe it's just me, but I remember watching world class marathons on TV and cringing and swearing at the TV the whole time through all sorts of fluff unrelated to the race and "up close and personal" segments.

The 80's and 90's are often looked at the dark age of American distance running, where we simply couldn't compete with the rest of the world.  It's probably no coincidence some of the biggest media marathon stories of that period were about non-distance runners like Oprah Winfrey and Florence Griffith Joyner.

And so perhaps is it indicative of the resurgence of American distance running that the Olympic Trials Marathon was covered by NBC for what is actually was:  A competition between highly trained athletes, rather than a whole bunch of human interest stories where some of the subjects happened to be pretty fast.

While the United States is not sending a men's and women's marathon team that's going to keep the Kenyans and Ethiopians up all night, its going to be a tough one. And I'm looking forward to watching the big race on NBC if they cover the race the same way they covered the US Olympic Trials.

Beer of the Month: Le Merle Saison from North Coast Brewing

2012-01-11T16:00:00.000-08:00

I don't know about you but I'm not quite ready to give up the holidays. That's why Le Merle Saison of North Coast Brewing is Beer of the Month for January. Looks like champagne in the glass, doesn't it? Well, a little bit.

I was given a bottle of this as a Christmas gift. After unwrapping it and thanking my friend who gave it to me, I thought to myself "Haven't I had this a bunch of times already". Except for the fact that that I couldn't remember the last time I had Le Merle, or what it tasted like.

Living in the Bay Area, Le Merle seems ubiquitous sitting on the shelves at all the speciality grocery stores, BevMos!, and better liquor stores and bottle shops. And so seeing it so often when buying beer created this odd familiarity, where the beer was some sort of friendly acquaintence in the beer aisle that I really didn't know.

It was time to change that. And getting to know this beer was more difficult than I expected. The taste is difficult to define. There's this light earthy yeasty background, with a bunch of crisp light fruit flavors mingling in the foreground sort. Is it pear, pineapple, lemon? I can't really tell for sure. It's very dry, with no sweetness at all.

Which is what I really like about Le Merle, it's unique and hard to define while avoiding to taste cluttered and muddled, always the sign of a great beer. Besides, if I wanted well defined fruit flavors in my drink, I'd just go down to Jamba Juice, order a smoothie, and pour vodka in it.

It's lightly earthy, yet crisp. Clean yet complex. A beer that could pass for sparkling wine if you aren't paying too close attention. A contradiction of flavors, a last gasp of the holidays, and Beer of the Month.

The Session #59: When I Don't Drink Beer, I Prefer the Wines of Anderson Valley

2012-01-06T06:10:00.000-08:00

Inspired by a Dos Equis commercial, Mario Rubio of Brewed for Thought  asks us to write about what we prefer to drink when not having beer, for this month's Session. As the world's 2,643,459,882 most interesting man, here's what I have to say.

If I had to put a date on my so-called "craft beer epiphany", it would be Memorial Day Weekend 2007. That weekend I took a trip with Linda, my girlfriend of about a year, to California's Mendocino County where we visited both Anderson Valley Brewing and North Coast Brewing. While I was already leaning in a craft beer direction, these visits not only opened my mind to realize the endless variety and possibilities of beer, but also made me aware of how connected beer can be to the place where it is brewed.

For the first time in my life, I went wine tasting as we also visited a few of Anderson Valley's wineries in central Mendocino County.   I discovered many of the different varietals and nuances of wine, and while recognizing that although wine is a rather one-dimensional beverage compared to beer, it can still be tasty.

And most importantly, after an effortlessly enjoyable weekend with Linda, I realized we had something pretty special going on, and today, Linda and I have been married for over a year.

You might say I hit the epiphany trifecta big time that weekend

What can I say about the wines of Anderson Valley beyond the warm fuzziness of that weekend? The area is known for luscious Pinot Noirs, my favorite varietal.   But the best part of Anderson Valley wine country is how genuine the people are at the various wineries you meet.  Linda and I have done the Napa Valley thing, which is basically like going to a  foodie amusement park.  In smaller, more isolated Anderson Valley, you're more likely to meet the wine maker or at least someone highly involved in the operations of the winery in the tasting room than most of California's other wine regions. The wine is every bit as good as you'll find in Napa, and costs about $15 less per bottle.

But the best thing about this wine growing region is once you're done wine tasting, you can drive just a few miles south and take the Anderson Valley Brewery tour.

Once again, the floor is open...your running questions answered

2012-01-05T16:00:00.000-08:00

Perhaps driven by a long held, yet never satisfied desire to coach, or by my life-long mission of being a know-it-all routinely giving out opinions, I once again open the floor to your running questions out there. You should rightfully ask, "What do you know about running?"

Well, I've been running over thirty years since I was twelve. I ran on high school and college track and cross-country teams and way more road races than I remember, from little neighborhood 5k's to the Boston Marathon. There was a time where I was quite the training wonk, reading just about every book on running I could get my hands on. And while I've had plenty of success at running, there's been lots of failures. There's been plenty of injuries, and at one point, was 60 pounds overweight, so I've gone through the pain and frustrations runners of all abilities go through. We all need help from time to time, and I do believe I have the experience and knowledge to draw on to help some of you out there.

So hope you will share your running question here with us, whether it be on training, racing, injuries, or anything to make your running more successful and enjoyable. No question is too basic, fundamental or esoteric. You can either leave a comment to this post, or send your questions to my slightly odd e-mail address at: photon(dot)dpeterman[at]gmail{dot}com or use the e-mail link here.

Reality Check for the New Year

2012-01-01T17:50:00.000-08:00

It's hard to beat a 10k race for starting the New Year for two reasons. One, every one's in a good mood for the holidays and the event is pretty good natured. The more practical reason is that it's good to have off-season reality checks to see how well you're really doing with your training. These smaller, less intense races actually provide a lot of good information to take into your goal races later in the year. And besides, if you run well, you can say "Wow, I'm ahead of where I thought I would be!". But if you run poorly, you can console yourself with "Well, I still have plenty of time to train for the big race". So how did it go for me at the New Year's Day Run for a Healthy World 10k?

I'm glad there's plenty of time to train from my half-marathon race target. I finished with a time of 39:39 for the 10k run on mostly gravel paths in the Palo Alto near the San Francisco Bay, virtually identical to last year's time. That despite I put in a lot more mileage in 2011 than in 2010, when I was just coming off a dislocated shoulder in October and a bad flu in November. All things considered, it just was a pretty lack-luster performance.

The first mile in that seemed easy at 6:06 was encouraging, but too fast, as was the next mile in 6:07. Then the wheels started coming off with 6:30-ish pace the rest of the way, and a real loss of focus around mile 5, which allowed someone to catch me with about 100 yards to go. So the take-aways from this race were:

1) A need to develop a better pace sense. The early pace at sub-6:10 was too fast, even though it seemed reserved and comfortable. Developing better pace sense should come from the weekly tempo runs I'll start doing this week that really helped for last years half-marathons to run at a more even and energy efficient pace.

2) Find a way to stay focused and run strong at the end of the race. The end of a race is a lot about simply digging down and finding a way to get through a "crisis period" where your body and mind want to shut things down. Of course, developing inner desire is an elusive intangible training objective, but putting yourself through a some "mini-hells" leading up to the race will prepare for the "total hell" at the key point in the big race. It's time to start ratchet up the intensity on the hard days.

So now that I have a good idea what I need to do, it's time to starting doing it. You want to start out things well, but for a runner, it's not realy about how you start. It's how you finish.

Ask Ramblings: How much weight is too much to be running?

2011-12-27T14:40:00.000-08:00

Our latest running question comes from Pete of Chicago who asks:

"At six feet tall, I've fluctuated up and down between 230 and 300 pounds over the last five years. I run (read: jog) 5K's every now and again. Now in my early thirties, I've been getting a smidgen of recurring knee pain. In general, is there some point where one is too heavy to run? A point at which I should simply focus on my diet (including less craft beer...[sniffle]) and lose weight until it's safer to put the stress of running on my knees? I enjoy running but have become more hesitant recently."

It's great that you've gone at it despite being heavier than a lot of runners, and since you describe the knee pain as "a smidgen", I'd keep my eye on it to make sure it doesn't get worse, but otherwise, I think you can keep on running. But you definately want to get your weight under control, becasue 70+ extra pounds of weight is putting a lot of extra wear and tear on your knees.

I asked Pete more about his knee pain, and he added this:

"The knee pain is not exclusively tied to running. If I run or bike for a while, it will be painful/sore afterwards. If I say, have to stand for 4 hours for a concert, it will be painful/sore afterwards. Then, much less consistently, I sometimes have pain while running, biking, or even something as simple as walking up steep stairs. The pain has not affected my running form at all, so I guess that's good."

I'll let you in on a secret. Plenty of runners go through some low level of pain similar to what you describe. I have knee soreness pretty regularly, and the ball of my right foot sometimes starts hurting on runs of 10 or more miles. Hardly any runner feels like those smiling faces on the cover of Runner's World and other fitness magazines, effortlessly running about in near-orgasmic bliss. Running is hard work that makes body parts sore.

The trick is to make sure the soreness from running isn't so bad that it affects your daily life, or starts affecting your running form. Favoring an injury in your running forms is particularly disastrous, as it often leads to unusual stresses on the legs, creating more injuries elsewhere. Certainly you want to get your diet in order, but if you can to run with a "smidgen" of pain and can both tolerate and manage that pain and still enjoy running, I'd continue to keep at it. Determining the balance between diet, exercise, career, social life, family, and other important things in your life, such as beer, to discover the weight you will be happiest at is one of those big life questions only you can answer.

I'd add that since you are past the age thirty, your body is going to take increasingly longer to recover from the pounding of running, and the joints are simply going to get more brittle, so if you enjoy running and other activities, carrying around those extra pounds are going to take a larger toll as you get older which is something you should factor in.

Finally, runners are constantly breaking down barriers, and so if you can overcome the extra weight and still run, congratulations on accomplishing a big part of the battle because you have what it takes to be a runner. There will always be people out there who'll say you're "too old" or "too heavy" to run. Don't ever let one of those people be you.

Got a running question? Submit it to Ramblings of a Beer runner via e-mail or a comment to this post and if I use your question, your reward will be my brilliant response, and something to tell your friends and grandkids for the rest of your life. I'm not a doctor, physical therapist, or coach, nor have played one on TV, but just trying to help fellow runners out, so my advice here for what that's worth.

Sorry, Pete got the last Ortholite insole and currently there's no swag to give you if I use your question.

Earn Your Beer at the 3rd Annual SF Beer Week Beer Run

2011-12-27T13:30:00.000-08:00

Once again, Brian Yaeger, Bryan Kolesar and myself invite you to celebrate the unlikely union of running and beer with the 3rd Annual SF Beer Week Beer Run, as part of San Francisco Beer Week.

When? February 12th, 2012 at 11:00 am

Where? Run starts and ends at Social Kitchen and Brewery, 1326 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94122. Click here for location.

How far? The run is approximately 5 miles much of it through picturesque Golden Gate Park, with an optional beer stop at Magnolia Pub and Brewery, as indicated on the official course map. (Sorry, the course won't be marked.) If you get lost or 5 miles is a little beyond your ability, feel free to head back anyway you want to Social Kitchen and Brewery for the post run festivities. In the friendly spirit of the event, finishing times or places will not be kept. As the run will be held on city sidewalks and streets, we ask all runners to obey traffic signs, stop lights, and other pedestrians.

What are the post run festivities? We're glad you asked. Each finisher of legal drinking age will get a dollar off their post-run beer(s) at Social Kitchen and Brewery. But wait, there's also the post run raffle with lots of great prizes. The grand prize is a $50 gift certificate to Social Kitchen and Brewery. We'll be awarding other great prizes like "Earn Your Beer" t-shirts from Adventure Sports Journal, an East Coast Beer Basket from Bryan Kolesar and others to be determined.

For the latest list of raffle prizes, look here.

Money raised in the post run raffle will be denoted in memory of beer writer Bill Brand to the Contra Costa Food Bank and also to Autism Speaks.

Come rain or shine. Race will only be cancelled in case of severe weather. Don't hesitate to let us know you're coming or ask any questions by posting a comment, or sending me an e-mail using a link from this page.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Beer of the Month: Cappuccino Stout from Lagunitas Brewing

2011-12-26T16:00:00.000-08:00

Normally I'd pick a holiday themed beer for the month of December, but the problem was, every holiday themed beer I tried this month was pretty underwhelming. Not bad, mind you, but nothing to make me sit up and say "That's the Beer of the Month!" And I certainly looked around. So with no holiday beer jumping out at me, I decided to choose a beer that's long been a favorite of mine each December when Lagunitas Brewing releases it. I'm talking about their Cappuccino Stout.

The first thing you'll notice with this beer is a blast of strong coffee aromas hitting your nose. Taste it, and you'll discover strong, sharp, roasted flavors of bitter chocolate and (surprise!) coffee. Coffee beers can sometimes be muddled, dull brews but this has a uniquely crisp and drinkable quality to it. But be careful, because at 9.2% abv, this one will knock you out in a hurry, all that caffine from the coffee not withstanding.

Seeing as most of the holidays have past, give this one a try to either break out of the holiday doldrums, or recover from the unsual holiday madness.

Back in Adventure Sports Journal

2011-12-20T19:30:00.000-08:00

I would like to think Adventure Sports Journal rejected the last couple articles I submitted to them due to artistic differences. But the unfortunate truth is these last couple articles, to put it into literary terms, sucked.

Of course, the editor of Adventure Sports Journal was way to kind to tell me my articles sucked. Instead responding with comments like "doesn't hang together" or "reads like a Wikipedia article" or the ultimate kiss of death "I'm sure there's a few people who would find this interesting". I suppose real writers actually use a more descriptive vocabulary to describe bad writing simply responding "this sucks".

But I appreciated the continued encouragement from the folks at Adventure Sports Journal, and published some short beer reviews of mine in the back of the magazine. I kept plugging away. And they liked my interview with Sean Turner of Mammoth Brewing posted earlier on this blog and decided to run it, which you can read it here.

One last Ortholite Insole Left for your Running Questions

2011-12-19T18:30:00.000-08:00

Once again, the floor is open for your questions. I cannot promise I can help you, but after running for 30 years, I've learned a few things about running along the way. And the fine folks at Ortholite have offered to provide one last insole to the person who's question I use.

Did you know that Ortholite insoles are designed to fit all athletic and outdoor shoes or boots, and made with open-cell foam, allowing air to circulate around the foot, keeping it cooler and drier inside the shoe? Or maybe you didn't know that it wicks moisture away from your foot leaving your foot cooler and drier, employing its unique spring-back technology ensures that your insole won’t flatten out and it will retain over 95% of its thickness over time. And get this, their patented anti-microbial formulation (approved by the EPA and FDA) fights fungus, bacteria and shoe odor, and its fully lightweight and fully washable.
And allowing me to give away another insole proves two things about Ortholite. They are certainly rather generous and they clearly do not read this blog.

So please don't hesitate submit your question either by leaving a comment, or sending me an e-mail. No question is too basic, fundamental, or esoteric. Look forward to hearing from you!

(Ortholite provided the product information and the insole.)

The old "ice cube in the sock" trick for Achilles Tendonitis

2011-12-18T17:00:00.000-08:00

I am grateful for Bay Area Half-Marathon Enthusiast Lauren Olerich of Sugarcoated Sisters for injecting some badly needed dignity to the "Ask Ramblings" forum with her question:
"Have you ever dealt with soreness in your Achilles tendon? While I'm running, everything seems fine. Once the shoes come off (New Balance WR890s), my right Achilles area gives me hell! The day after a run, I hobble around. Strangely, if I'm at home and not wearing shoes, the heel pain doesn't pop up. Any recommendations on how to avoid the pain? (Short of going shoe-less at work, of course!) Any warm-up exercises? Cross-training suggestions?"

Have I ever dealt with soreness in my Achilles tendon? You bet and it's no fun! The most effective treatment I've found for it is the "ice cube in a sock trick". Simply put on a sock, and slip in an ice cube positioned over the sore area and leave it there for at least 15 minutes. I've found even one treatment can really bring the soreness under control.

You can leave it there longer if you want and I've left it long enough that the whole cube melts. You can repeat this a few times each day to bring down the swelling, but it's most effective to ice right after your run to keep the swelling down and allow as much blood as possible to repair the damage.

Tight calves will put a lot of pressure on the Achilles tendon, so keep them loose. This video will help and I also do stretches numbered 4 and 5 here. You want to be careful doing a lot of stretching with a sore Achilles tendon, so a balm like Icy Hot can help loosen the calves without putting extra pressure on tendon.

Since you mention that going barefoot seems to lesson the pain, you might want to consider both running and everyday shoes that have low heel raises. This doesn't seem to be a good time to be wearing high heels.

Good luck and let me know how this works out for you. And remember, I'm not a professional physical therapist or anything. Just another guy giving out free advice who hopes you get more than you paid out of it.

Got a beer running question? Submit it to Ramblings of a Beer runner via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter or a comment to this post and if I use your question, your reward will be an Ortholite Shoe Insole, my brilliant response, and potential world wide humiliation on the Internet.

Ask Ramblings and win an Ortholite Insole

2011-12-13T16:00:00.000-08:00

Once again, the floor is open for your questions. I cannot promise I can help you, but after running for 30 years, I've learned a few things about running along the way. And the fine folks at Ortholite have offered to provide another insole to the person who's question I use.

Did you know that Ortholite insoles are designed to fit all athletic and outdoor shoes or boots, and made with open-cell foam, allowing air to circulate around the foot, keeping it cooler and drier inside the shoe? Or maybe you didn't know that it wicks moisture away from your foot leaving your foot cooler and drier, employing its uunique spring-back technology ensures that your insole won’t flatten out and it will retain over 95% of its thickness over time. And get this, their patented anti-microbial formulation (approved by the EPA and FDA) fights fungus, bacteria and shoe odor, and its fully lightweight and fully washable.

And allowing me to give away another insole proves two things about Ortholite. They are certainly rather generous and they clearly do not read this blog.

So please don't hesitate submit your question either by leaving a comment, or sending me an e-mail. No question is too basic, fundamental, or esoteric. Look forward to hearing from you!

(Ortholite provided the product information and the insole.)

Dear Ramblings: How Can I Succeed at Chunder Running

2011-12-12T18:20:00.000-08:00

For the inaugural "Ask Ramblings" Beer Running question, we start with this one posted anonymously:

"I would like to know how one succeeds at the disciplines of running AND beer drinking at the same time. Way back when, in college, we used to have this contest called "The Chunder Run," which combined beer chugging with running all-out. Even after becoming the event's race director, which I thought would give me an unfair advantage, I came in second at the race and never won it. Oh wait, the second time I lost, it was... to you!

Please help me, as being first runner-up at the Chunder Run for two years in a row has been the thorn in my side for 20 years...."

Dear "Anonymous":
I would first like to categorically deny ever participating in an event held at the conclusion of the Washington University - St. Louis cross-country season called simply "The Chunder Run" consisting of a five mile race where a cans of the cheapest beer we could find was consumed at the beginning and after each mile and the resulting projectile vomiting was said to be impressive.

Now if I were ever to participate in such an event, I would approach it like any other race. First, figure out a good target pace based on current training level, then start out at that target pace for the first third of the race, push the pace slightly in the middle third if the pace seems manageable, and then fight like hell for the final third.

As for training for this race, it's important to keep periodically challenging yourself and varying your training to develop the mental toughness to roll with whatever the race throws at you, be it hills, uneven terrain, weather, or really bad beer beer surging up your esophagus.

As for dealing with being runner up for two years in a row, I'm afraid I cannot help you with that, but can recommend a good therapist.
I also refuse to confirm that the "anonymous" poster of this question is Brian Kim of Tempe, AZ who was a teammate of mine on the Washington University cross country team back in the day.

Got a beer running question? Submit it to Ramblings of a Beer runner via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter or a comment to this post and if I use your question, your reward will be an Ortholite Shoe Insole, my brilliant response, and potential world wide humiliation on the Internet.

Got a running question? Just ask Ramblings.....and get an Ortholite Insole

2011-12-05T16:15:00.000-08:00

There are way too many people giving out advice, and I'm about to join their ranks. I've decided to take this blog in a little different direction by answering running questions from other runners. Perhaps this has been driven by a long held, yet never satisfied desire to coach, or by my life-long mission of being a know-it-all routinely giving out opinions. You should rightfully ask, "What do you know about running that make you better than all the other experts?"

A good question I will not answer that question directly. I will say I've been running for a long time, over thirty years since I was twelve.   I ran on high school and college track and cross-country teams and way more road races than I remember, from little neighborhood 5k's to the Boston Marathon. There was a time where I was quite the training wonk, reading just about every book on running I could get my hands on. And while I've had plenty of success at running, there's been lots of failures.  There's been plenty of injuries, and at one point, was 60 pounds overweight, so I've gone through the pain and frustrations runners of all abilities go through.   We all need help from time to time, and I do believe I have the experience and knowledge to draw on to help some of you out there.

So hope you will share your running question here with us, whether it be on training, racing, injuries, or anything to make your running more successful and enjoyable. No question is too basic, fundamental or esoteric. I suppose you could ask also a question about beer as well, but my beer knowledge extends to mostly having drunk a lot of it. Send your questions to my slightly odd e-mail address at: photon(dot)dpeterman[at]gmail{dot}com or use the e-mail link here.

You can also post your question on the Ramblings of a Beer Runner Facebook page or tweet it via Twitter.

And thanks to Ortholite, if I use your question, you'll win a pair of Ortholite Fusion insoles.   Ortholite was previously found only exclusively in many of the top athletic shoes, but are now available for purchase to go in any pair of shoes. Made with open-cell foam allowing air to circulate around the foot, keeping it cooler and drier inside the shoe, they also have a patented anti-microbial formulation (approved by the EPA and FDA) fights fungus, bacteria and shoe odor. (Ortholite supplied the insoles and product information for this giveaway.)

Look forward to hearing from you all out there.   It should be interesting.

The Beer Experts Have Expressed Their Polite Silence on Habenero Chili Stout

2011-11-28T16:15:00.000-08:00

You'd think after the last three batches of home brew that ranged from barely drinkable to down right awful, I should just give up brewing altogether. But then, there have been times running where long term fatigue and multiple injuries lead to pain and frustration for weeks and months on end.   It happens to a lot of runners, and you need just keep working through the difficulties and find ways to correct the problems to eventually come through it a wiser runner than before. So in that spirit, I just kept at it with home brewing. Of course, it is also possible the culmulation of all those slight jolts to my head with each running footstrike over 30 years has resulted in a certain level of brain damage which clouds my judgement.

So whether motivated by positive thinking or simple brain dysfunction, I decided to brew a Habenero Chile Stout feeling slightly confident I'd isolated the source of the contamination that soured my last brews. You may reasonably ask "Why on earth would you brew something like that?". I would like to answer the strong, roasty flavors of stout and stimulating Habenero chiles are part of my personality, vision, and creativity as a brewer. But the more honest answer is that agressively roasted malts and hot chiles are great at masking any off-flavors lurking around in the brew.

For the recipe, I used Randy Mosher's Black Ship Pirate Stout from his excellent book Radical Brewing.

5.5 lbs Amber Dry Extract
1.5 lbs Black Patent Malt
1.5 lbs Dark Molassess
1.0 lbs Dark Crystal Malt
5 gallons distalled water

1.0 once Willamette Hops (90 minutes)
2.0 onces Styrian Golding (30 minutes)

After mashing and sparging the grain, the resulting wort and powered extract was boiled for 90 minutes. With five minutes left in the boil, I added this spice mix:

1/2 tablespoon fresh ground pepper
1/2 tablespoon commercial chili powder
1/8 teaspoons Habenero chile powder

English Ale Yeast was used to fermet the brew, which was racked to a secondary in three weeks, and then bottled two weeks later.

The idea was to replicate Mexican chocolate, with a little heat mingling with the roasty chocolate flavors. I'd say this came close. You can certainly detect the heat from the Habeneros. Its strong, but I didn't find it overpowering, and it takes front stage to a complex roasted malt background.   I'll also add that the heat from the chiles mellowed after the bottles had aged after 3-4 weeks.   I thought it was and interesting and unique beer, but then since I brewed it, I'm bound to be biased.

So I took a bottle to this month's Bay Area Beer Bloggers meet-up and bottle share to see what experienced beer drinkers in the Bay Area Craft Brewing community thought about at.  I've known Brian Stechshulte for nearly a year and as a graduate of The Ohio State University, find him to be an inspiration as he's overcome his education from the University of Michigan to become a decent, productive member of society.   (We don't need to talk about last weekend's Ohio State-Michigan game.) I don't recall what he said about the Habernero Chile Stout or if he even tried it. For some reason, he seemed more interested in sampling from bottles of 2009 and 2010 vintages of the always excellent Deschutes' Abyss sitting on the table, as well as all the other stouts available that night from highly renowned and hard to find breweries than something from a hack homebrewer who insults his alma mater on a regular basis. Imagine that.

Next up was John Heylin who remarked "The chiles are noticeable, but not that hot. It's smokey." Colin James, who graciously hosted the bottle share at his apartment agreed "You can certainly taste the chile powder". Both Chuck Lenatti and I noticed a metallic taste. There are know-it-alls who claim "metallic" is an off flavor, but it actually provides a mysterious complexity to the brew.   Beyond that, the silence was a little telling. Nobody came out and said "I don't like this" or even "this sucks" something people often think, yet rarely say, but nobody said "this is good" or "I like it" either.    Never the less, I'll take this polite awkward silence as a ringing endorsement from the Bay Area Beer Bloggers of my latest home brew.

Yeah right.

Ledger's Liquors: The Bottle Shop Time Almost Forgot

2011-11-21T15:10:00.000-08:00

Walking into Ledgers Liquors in Berkeley, CA feels like walking into some sort of time machine set to 1977. The faded light brown wood paneling adorned with traditional beer signs and the old linoleum tile floor underneath your feet come from an earlier, simple time. Which you would probably expect from a family business started in 1935, and is now in its third generation. But take a close look at the beer on the shelves, and Ledgers becomes highly contemporary, if not cutting edge.

Sure, the bottles are arranged rather haphazardly, seemingly where ever they can fit on loosely defined "domestic" and "import" shelves. But search through this chaos carefully, and you'll find beers you rarely see anywhere else. From this unassuming liquor store, I've found rare beers such as Dogfish Head's Hellhound on My Ale and Stone Brewing's Cherry Chocolate Stout, and there's always a wide menagerie of Russian River selections. You do not earn the privilege of stocking beers like these on your shelves unless you've built the reputation of being one of the best bottle shops in the country. Unlike other bottle shops which often host release parties announcing new beers with great fanfare, great beers at Ledger tend to show up quietly unannounced. And lest you think this store is only for beer geeks, beers like Budweiser, Coors Light, and Keystone are prominently on display. There's something for everyone here.

So all I can say is that if your looking for some of the most skillfully brewed beers in the world, or just need a 40 ouncer of Old English Malt Liquor to make it through your day, do the world a favor and buy something here to help support this great American institution.

Beer of the Month: Fireside Chat by 21st Amendment

2011-11-15T17:00:00.000-08:00

Why has it taken so long for something from 21st Amendment to earn this blogs "Beer of the Month"? I've long been a fan of this brewery, so one of life's minor mysteries has been rectified as 21st Amendment's Fireside Chat takes this month's honors.

What can I say about this beer? First, you got to love the can art which depicts FDR sitting by the fireplace chatting jovially with a holiday elf. The beer itself has this great ruby brown color and sturdy, sticky head to it, hitting most of the visually aesthetic points if you're in to that sort of thing. But my favorite attribute about this beer is that it tastes "wintery" in an obvious, yet undefinable way.
At least what I taste is a strong, slightly nutty ale with cinnamon, some nutmeg, and some other spices. 21st Amendment uses cocoa nibbs which I didn't pick up at first taste, but I believe provides the earthy, nutty note to the brew. Magnum and Goldings hops give it 45 ibu's, but it just doesn't seem that bitter, with the hefty amount of malt seeming keeping it in check. At 7.9% abv, it's more drinkable than of lot of winter warmers, almost quasi-sessional in a "have a couple in an evening and still be standing upright" sort of way.

Which I think is the best thing about Fireside Chat. Do we need another monster Holiday Ale, checking in at 12% abv, brewed with Frankincense, Candy Cane Sugar, and Reindeer Must? I think not.

The Brooklyn Brew Shop's Beer Making Book: Homebrewing for the Rest of Us

2011-11-10T12:15:00.000-08:00

Last time I brewed a five gallon batch of stout in my small cramped apartment kitchen, lugging around all the hot liquids in heavy containers created all sorts of spills, drips, and splatters that by the time I was done, it looked like someone with stout colored blood had been murdered in my kitchen.   I don't home brew as often as I'd like since my small apartment kitchen didn't seem like good place to do it. But my kitchen is an ideal place to brew using standard equipment found in most kitchens to make smaller 1 gallon all-grain receipes, as I found out reading the The Brooklyn Brew Shop's Beer Making Book, writen by Stephen Valand and Erica Shea, owners of the The Brooklyn Brew Shop.

"We wanted to create something where people familiar with a cook book could just start making beer," explains co-author Stephen Valand. "We didn't want to say, first thing to do is go to a hardware store." The book describes how to brew beer in small, scaled down 1 gallon batches, a far more manageable size than standard five gallon recipes found most in home brewing books and magazines. At these small batch sizes, little specialized equipment is necessary to brew beer, such that "..if you've ever made a pot of pasta, you're in good shape".

Erica and Stephen founded their business in 2009 the way a lot of business are created: Through serendipity, followed by looking around, asking questions, and recognizing a unmet demand. In their case, it started when Erica discovered an old glass carboy in her father's basement from his brief home brewing excersion fifteen years ago. After making ice cream and pasta from scratch, Stephen and Eric decided their next food project would be to brew beer, so they went about reading up on home brewing.

"A lot of the books seemed to be written for someone with a Ph.D. in Chemistry," recalls Stephen. "and there were really no place to get home brewing equipment in New York City." This was largely due to the fact that homebrewing emerged as a hobby in the 80's where 5 gallon and larger batches of beer were typically brewed in backyards, basements, and garages to accomodate equipment like large propane heating torches.   Few New York City homes had the space and facilities to accomodate this, something plenty of people in San Francisco Bay Area can relate to.

After adapting standard home brewing techniques to one gallon batches, they developed their own one gallon recipes. Realizing that food conscious New Yorkers were ill-equipped to join the craft and home brewing revolution, they started selling home brewing kits at the Brooklyn Flea, a local food and crafts fair, in 2009.    Making brewing accessible to the masses turned out to be good business, and they expanded into a 6,000 square foot warehouse a year later to keep up with demand.   Today you can purchase their kits and recipes in Whole Foods, Williams-Sonoma and other retail locations all over the country, as this handy dandy store locator on their website will show you.

As for their new book, it explains the equipment needed to brew one gallon batches, with a brief introduction to brewing malts, hops, and beer styles in simple direct manner. What follows are 52 different brewing recipes, with a few standard beer styles like IPA's, Porters, and Pale Ales, but plenty of beers that are kind of out there, such as Lady Lavender Blonde Ale, Eggnog Milk Stout, and Lobster Saison which is brewed using an empty lobster shell.

Of course, it took some experimentation to come up with all those different beers. "There are a few beers we made that have been hidden away, and we don't talk about," concedes Stephen. "We experimented with a lot of different woods for our Bourbon Dubbel. We tried cedar wood, which someone told us was poisonous. It tasted like drinking the closet."

And if you ask me, experimentation and sharing beer you made with family and friends is the best thing about home brewing, an element sometimes lost in the home brewing community, where there can be a lot of emphasis on reproducing and miniaturizing an actual brewing operation. Given the fact any professional brewing operation, even your local craft brewery, is mostly concerned with sanitizing large metal objects and meticulously pouring over brewing data to brew batch after batch of identical tasting beer, it is not surprising that a lot of mainstream home brewing really doesn't resonate with the general public.

And this book brings up one of the parallels I've descovered about beer and running. One of the best things about running is you don't need any special equipment or belong to any elite club. All you need to do is lace up a pair of running shoes, go outside, and you're a runner. One of the best things about beer is that if you take grains, hops, water and yeast and combine them the right way, you're a brewer. Thanks to this book, more of us can be brewers.

(An advance copy of this book was provided by Randon House Publishing for the purposes of this review.)

The Session #57: Fizzy Blueberries

2011-11-06T17:00:00.000-08:00

For this month's Session Steve Lamond of Beers I've Known pinch hits for Peter Brown while Peter recovers from the theft of his PC, and asks us to share our "beer confessions and guilty pleasures."

There have been many moments in my life where beer was involved that I look back and think "Why on earth did I do that?". It would not be wise to share most of those moments on the internet for all to see, but will confess to a guilty beer pleasure I discovered the time I took my family on vacation to San Diego last year.

We starting the trip driving down from our home on the San Francisco peninsula, and after a morning of driving, rolled into Paso Robles a little before noon on a Monday to stop for lunch at Downtown Brewing, located in the main square in the center of town. For some odd reason, I ordered the one "chick beer" they had on the menu, their Blueberry Ale.   You know what beer I'm talking about, the one on their tap list for those who would otherwise get something like Coors Light or Corona if it were available.

Maybe because I was thirsty and at that early hour, just wasn't ready for an IPA, Stout, or some of the other styles they had on tap. The waitress brings it out and there's a bunch of blueberries in the light golden brew swirling around at the bottom half of the pint glass. It looked like one of those Asian inspired tapioca pearl drinks you see junior high school girls slurping down at the local mall. Thank goodness the place was pretty empty and only my wife and kids were there to see me drink this totally unmanly foo-foo girlie beer.   My nine and seven year old kids laughed and pointed to the blueberries, and I forced myself to laugh with them, but the whole time I'm thinking "Why did I just order this?".
I braced myself for something sickening sweet, but the blueberry flavor was really restrained, with only the barest of sweetness and provided a great accent to the light ale. Subtlety and balance in a light refreshing ale is an underrated thing of brewing beauty, and if you asked me, Main Street nailed it. Sometimes beer works in mysterious ways and this odd looking concoction was exactly the beer I needed to regenerate before continuing our journey south.

So if someday you find me hiding in a dark closet clutching an empty beer glass with dark blue stains on my hands and face, you'll know why.

Mike Royko and the Beginnings of the Craft Brewing Revolution

2011-11-03T18:13:00.000-07:00

Little did I know Mike Royko, one of my all time favorite writers, helped launch the craft brewing revolution in the 70's. Royko's daily newspaper columns were full of blunt, crusty sarcasm that somehow held an underlying warmth that completely resonated with the city of Chicago. He gave Governor Jerry Brown the name "Governor Moonbeam". I remember opening the newspaper each morning to page 2 to read what Royko had to say about Chicago politics, sports, food or culture.

Joe Sixpack's later column chronicles how Rokyo's bitter snarky criticism of beer in the 70's and his championing of smaller regional brewers helped start create the current American beer landscape. You can read about it here.

What's the point in writing about the Stone Brewing Brewmaster's Dinner at California Cafe?

2011-11-01T15:43:00.000-07:00

That's the question.   Why should I even bother writing about this? I mean, Stone brews great beer, and the California Cafe in Palo Alto puts on great beer dinners featuring a California brewery about once a month. Is there any point of even writing about it, other than to say, "Well, it was great"?

Besides, I'm not a exactly a culinary expert such that I can really deconstruct the subtleties and nuances of the combined brewing vision of Stone's Greg Koch combined with California Cafe's Mark Pettyjohn's magic in the kitchen.   But I can sort of fake it. And aren't blogs all about writing about stuff you have no business writing about for the sole purpose of looking more important than you really are? So in this proud tradition, I will provide my take on the Stone Brewing Brewmaster's dinner in an attempt at entertainment, or your possible amusement at my expense.

First Course
Food: Grilled Portobello Mushroom, chic pea fries, foie gras croutons, goat cheese
Beer: Arrogant Bastard

The first course was a significant food milestone for me since I've never had foie gras before starting off the beer dinner with this.  It's hard not be be curious about foie gras, as the food seems so highly polarizing.   On one side, you have those who claim eating it is the most heavenly orgasmic surreal experience in the world. On the other side, you have PETA-inspired backlash claiming it embodies everything wrong with civilization. Having now tried it, I have to say I'm a little bewildered this fatty stuff with a light livery taste to it has generated so much commotion.

I mean, it tasted all right, but if I had to face down a bunch of angry animal rights activists just to eat it again, I'd go for something else.  Sitting to my left for the evening was Peter Estaniel of BetterBeerBlog of fame, who really enjoyed his and he's a big foie gras fan, so Chef Pettyjohn must have executed it well.

Peter also probably forgot more about beer and food pairing last week than I'll never know. After the first course, I turned to him and said "You know, the Arrogant Bastard seemed to over powered the Grilled Mushroom a little," and he immediately responds with a complex explanation about the roasted malts and the hop varieties contrasting with the grilled mushroom and other elements on the plate. I struggled to follow what he was saying.   I think he agreed with me.

My favorite thing about the first course was not the grilled mushroom or the foie gras croutons, but the well seasoned chick pea fries. PETA 1 Foie Gras 0.

The Second Course in all its porkosity

Second Course
Food: House cured pork belly, crispy pancetta, smoked bacon butter
Beer: Ruination IPA

The smoked bacon butter and house cured pork belly melded together to form a bunch of creamy pork stuff, contrasting with the crispy pancetta, a bunch of crunchy pork stuff. Ruination IPA, with plenty of strong pineapple and grapefruit hop flavors and no malt backbone to speak of, cut right through all that pork goodness.

I turn to Peter again after the second course to pick his brain on the second course. Instead of a detailed, insightful deconstruction of the interplay between the different pork elements and the hops, he simply says "Mmmmmmm, that was good." I can work with that.

Surprise Course
Food: Duck medallions with cherry compote on top
Beer: Cherry Chocolate Stout

Surpise! After the second course, they bring out the Stone Cherry Chocolate Stout, a limited release that is otherwise sold out and unavailable. It's got plenty of bitter chocolate flavors and cherry, think of a decadent liquid chocolate covered cherry. And the duck medallions with the cherry compote basically echoed that, even though Chef Pettyjohn conceded they were under salted to my wife and I at the end of the dinner. Chef, if you hadn't told us that, we wouldn't have noticed.

Third Course
Food: Braised beef short ribs, parsnip puree, crispy onion strings
Beer: Imperial Russian Stout, Vintage ’08

What to say here, once again, the food and beer basically echoed each other. And once again, my favorite element on the plate was a lovely, creamy parsnip puree under the braised beef ribs, rather than the savory ribs themselves. Strike another blow for PETA!

Fourth Course

It's a big party of all things carrot

Food: Carrot cake, tipsy raisins, carrot gel
Beer: Old Guardian barley wine, Vintage ’09

My favorite dish of the night. Way too often, beer dinners end with a desert of Imperial Stout with something like a chocolate tort, or some other Stout and chocolate combination. Sure, the combination works, often quite well, but it's an obvious pairing and not particularly imaginative to the point of becoming a cliche'. Instead, for the desert course we get a whimsical plate of all things carrot with this odd, carrot egg roll that comes out of left field. Some people, like me, loved it, others were a bit underwhelmed by it, but everyone was talking about it, and by that measure, it was a hit. And the aged Old Guardian with its smooth, sweetness, and slight astringency jumped right into the big party.

There's a nasty rumor that this might be the last of the Brewmaster's Dinners for the year with the holidays fast approaching. I sure hope that isn't true, as the best part of the series is a certain suspense in seeing what Chef Pettyjohn and the California Cafe crew do next.

Drinking Local on the High Sierras: Mammoth Brewing

2011-10-27T12:15:00.000-07:00

Inside Mammath Brewing's Tap Room (photo from Sean Turner)

Hearing the words "head for the mountains" brings back awkward college memories of swilling cheap Busch beer in college back in the 80's. Thankfully in our more enlightened times, heading for California's Sierra Mountains won't lead you to a skunky brew, but the fine beers of Mammoth Brewing.

Located in Mammoth Lakes on the eastern edge of Yosemite National Forest, the brewery was founded by Sam Walker in 1995, who sold it to current owner Sean Turner in 2006. Turner explains that what makes his beer unique is that at 8,000 feet, water boils at 198 degrees Fahrenheit, rather than 212 degrees at sea level, resulting in a softer flavor profile in the brewing process.    He also adds that a 8,000 feet, the mountain water they use is the purest being furthest upstream. Mammoth is known for their Golden Trout Pilsner, Epic IPA, IPA 395,  Double Nut Brown, and Hair of the Bear Doppelbck among their more popular beers. They've won a slew of awards at the California State Fair and other beer competitions, so they must be doing a lot right.

I can personally vouch for IPA 395, named after the main highway through the Eastern Sierras. Mammoth Brewing uses locally grown hops with dessert sage and mountain juniper to create one of the more unique and memorable California IPA's you'll find. If hoppy beers aren't your thing, then give Mammoth's Hair of the Bear Doppelbock a try.   It tastes like liquid banana bread with it's banana-like fruity esters melding seamlessly with the highly roasted malts.

In addition to innovative brewing, Mammoth Brewing was one of the first craft breweries to distribute beer in cans. "Putting in a canning line was one of the first things I did at Mammoth, before the sale was even completed," recalls Turner. "We sell most of our beer around Yosemite and putting beer into cans made it much easier for hikers to carry into the forest. We've increased our output by a factor of three since 2006, and going to cans was a big part of that." The second largest region for Mammoth is the Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, as the beer is also popular with skiers.

Mammoth Lakes is also the home of the mighty Mammoth Track Club which includes many of  elite runners, including United States Olympic Marathoners Deena Kastor and Meb Keflezighi. These athletes are seen all over town but apparently are focused more on running fast and winning races than drinking beer, as they rarely venture into Mammoth Brewing's tap room. Turner remembers his first encounter with Meb Keflezighi when "Meb approached me about a deal to wear a cap with our logo on it for a couple hundred dollars. I barely knew who he was and I had just started running the brewery to get the brewery, so decided to pass on the idea.    Next thing you know, he wins the New York Marathon and becomes famous."

In early November, Mammoth will release its Owen's Valley Wet Harvest Ale, brewed using organically grown hops from a local hop farmer transported straight from the hop fields into the brew kettle. Mammoth Brewing purchases these hops to support agriculture in Owen's Valley, a battle ground of California water rights where much of the local water has been diverted to Los Angeles.

To find Mammoth Beers, you literally need to head for the mountains as Mammoth Brewing distributes only from Truckee down to Kern County along the High Sierras. You can also stop by Mammoth's Tap room open daily from 10am-6pm at 94 Berner Street in Mammoth Lakes. Two ounce tasting samples are free.

Interviewed on Beer Samizdat

2011-10-25T12:52:00.000-07:00

I was surprised the day Jay Hinman, author of the Beer Samizdat blog asked if he could interview me, especially since I don't know the correct pronunciation of "Samizdat". I've always enjoyed Jay's smart and enthusiastic writing on Hedonist Beer Jive, which evolved into Beer Samizdat as he expanded his writing into other interests. Turns out Jay is a Beer Runner too, having taken up running a few years ago.

So it is indeed a privilege to be interview by him, and I appreciated his simple, yet thought provoking questions. You'll find the interview here.

The Grape Stomp Half Marathon: Where'd that come from?

2011-10-23T18:14:00.000-07:00

There are good races, bad races, and then there are races like the one I ran this morning which make you say "How did I pull that out of my ass?". I went into Grape Stomp Half-Marathon in Livermore, CA hoping to run something like 1:26-1:27 and finished in 1:24:10 on a course with some decent hills on it, good for seventh place overall, and 3rd in the 40-49 group. (Us old guys are kinda fast.) And kudo's to Finish Line Productions who put on a great race on a scenic and varied course.

This race turned into one of those surreal events where good things unexpectly happen so fast, you don't realize what's going on. My plan going into the race was to hit 6:40 pace through 6 miles, which is 40:00. I come through at 38:13 feeling pretty good, and all I could think was "Hmmmm....well, I'm ahead of pace." Expecting to see certain times at certain miles and instead seeing a totally different time on my watch caused me to simply dismiss each mile split without really thinking about what was actually happening. I just concentrated on the runners ahead of me and the hills at the later stages of the race, worrying little about time.. I cross the finish line, look at my watch, see 1:24:15 and think, "Did I just do that?"

After bad races, I typically go through all sorts of soul searching about what went wrong and how to fix it. So with this equally mystifying good run, maybe it's time to reflect on the things I got right and how to build on that. And yes, blogs are great vehicles for navel gazing, but know some of you out there run, so you might actually benefit from a few nuggets of running wisdom I learned this year.

Day to Day, Month to Month, and Year to Year Consistancy is key
I spent the latter half of the last three years in some related injury rehab the prevented me from running. Whether it was bad tendonitis in the knees that I finally gave into in 2008, a bad hip imbalance I had to see a chiropracter for in 2009, and a dislocated shoulder in 2010, I just could never string several good months of training together. Taking a lot better care of myself, doing more stretching and avoiding the layoffs was really key.

Finding a Good Crew to Run with is Golden
I joined the Palo Alto Run Club (PARC) last May, a group full of talented, hard working running and got a bunch of great runs in. Those "easy" five milers where we'd start hitting 6:25, 6:10 pace I think paid off. Do enough 6:25 miles in your regular runs, and it'll start seeming like nothing. And there's something about the shared experience of a run with others that makes all the hard work more meaningful.

Run your long runs fast
I put in a bunch of 12 mile runs along the Sawyer Camp Trail, a nifty running trail on San Francisco Peninsula. Most of them were timed efforts and several of them were with PARC, which meets there every Saturday morning. I'm not a fan of slow long distance runs. Do your long distance fast. But be careful, since fast long runs will take a lot out of you, and I normally did one every couple weeks to give myself plenty of recovery.

Tempo Runs are your Friend
The biggest difference in my training between the Water to Wine Half Marathon, where I ran a 1:28:46 in August and the 1:24:10 at the Grape Stomp were Jack Daniel's inspired tempo runs. (That's Jack Daniels, the revolutionary track coach, not the bourbon.) There's a high school track conveniently one mile away from where I lived, so once a week, I'd run to it, run 4 miles comfortably hard at anerobic threshold pace around the track, and then run home. Tempo runs like that also help build focus, concentration, and create "pace sense" which helps any runner.

I might do another race or two before the end of the year, but nothing major, as this is basically the end of the racing season for me. I still plan to start going to back to work soon, pointing towards the US Half Marathon in San Francisco this coming April.

But after this morning, I am tired. And drinking beer.

Brewmaster's Dinner featuring Stone Brewing at California Cafe in Palo Alto

2011-10-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

There's a great looking beer dinner featuring Stone Brewing coming up at the California Cafe in Palo Alto this Thursday. They always put on a great dinner and usually the brewmaster is on hand to talk about end beer. Seeing Greg Koch there may be a little too much to ask, but expect a knowledgeable rep from Stone Brewing being there. I have my reservation and expect they'll fill up fast. Hope to see you there. (The details and menu below were shamelessly swiped from The BetterBeerBlog.)

Who: California Café in Palo Alto
What: Brewmaster’s Dinner featuring Stone Brewing Company
Where: California Café, 700 Welsh Road, Palo Alto, CA map
When: Thursday, October 27, 2011 @ 6pm – 9pm
Cost: $45 per person, exclusive of gratuity. Call 650-325-2233 , or email paloalto@californiacafe.com to make your reservations today!

Beer of the Month: Lagunitas Doppel Weizen

2011-10-17T20:10:00.000-07:00

For the month of October, I thought about giving the honor to a pumpkin beer, and I had a good one in mind. But pumpkin beers are quickly becoming a bit of a cliche in my opinion, and I decided to go with a more traditional style that you don't see much these days.

And so the Beer of the Month for October 2011 is a nifty Doppel Weizen from Lagunitas. For those of those of you who thought a wheat beer was one of those light summer beers, you'll be in for a bit of a shock with this one.

The yeast really dominates, producing strong aromatic clove-like spiciness complimented with a little banana-like fruitiness on a bready, slightly toasty malt substrate. It's a strong tasting beer with a slight alcohol heat, that nearly crosses the line into harshness, but thankfully doesn't.

So if you're looking for a real change of pace this month without resorting to having pumpkin in your brew, pick up this unique seasonal from Lagunitas.
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A Strange Trail Running Affair

2011-10-11T18:13:00.000-07:00

I have the same problem with running trails I used to have with women. I seek out the one that are gorgeous and difficult ones, and the few and fleeting good times seemed to be worth allthe pain. Sure, trail runningis full of aesthetic beauty and training benefits you can’t find on the roads, andit’s a great way to train as you constantly have to adapt to the changingterrain. But that leads to more risk for injuries, andI’ve had plenty of bruised toes, sore knees, strained ankles, and even adislocated shoulder to show for it.

All course seeking beauty and overcomingbarriers and taking risks is good attitude for a runner, but this approach inyour personal life can cause you to seek love from people you shouldn’t fall inlove with. Thankfully, a good therapistshowed me the errors of my ways in personal relationships, but this desire tokeep running on the trails seems like I’m stuck in a bad love affair.

I first realized this on a hiking tripto Berry Creek Falls in Big Basin State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains a couple years ago. I had run a competitive half-marathonthrough those very trails only a few months earlier, but found the trails onthat hike almost completely unrecognizable. That’s because I ran the half-marathonlike a hunted animal, desperately focused on the uneven, rocky ground just afew feet ahead of me in order to avoid a serious face plant, ignoring thetowering redwoods overhead and panoramic views of the surrounding mountains. The set ofcascading waterfalls in the center of the park is a place where people linger,relax, and enjoy the unique sights and peaceful sounds, but they were just an anomaloussparkling blip I blew by during the half-marathon race. This leisurely hike through these same woodsmade me realize that running or hiking through the woods creates a totally different perspective and appreciation of the forest.

So these days, a bit older andpresumably wiser, when I get to the top of the hill or to a scenic overlook,it’s time to stop for a few seconds and enjoy the view before hurrying along. I now realize this brief interlude is something I deserve, but the nagging injuries from the trails keep coming, especially since I'm not getting any younger. But despite the problems, I don't want to give up on this relationship. I may be blind, but I still think we can work through all this.

The Session #56: Damn Right I'm a Bud Man!

2011-10-07T15:40:00.000-07:00

For this month's Session Rueben Gray of Tale of Ale asks us to write about our appreciation for the "Big Boys" the large breweries most craft beer advocates most passionately hate. I risk ridicule from the Beer Blogging Community and having my Beer Geek Membership Card revoked by singing the praises of Budweiser.

I first gained an appreciation of Budweiser while discovering craft beer. It was during my RateBeer phase a few years ago, when I carefully tasted and documented each and every beer I could possibly get my hands on, whether it be "craft" or "macro". When I got around to putting a six-pack once bottle of Budweiser through those paces, I remember my surprise at how good Bud actually tasted. Now it certainly wasn't a good beer, but it wasn't a bad one, either. So while your local brewer almost certainly makes a better lager than Budweiser, I'll have a Bud with its crisp, clear light green apple flavors and slightly astringent finish over any of its macro-lager brethren full of skunky off flavors any day of the week.

I'm also appreciative that Budweiser is central to the American barbecue, our country's unique contribution to world cuisine. Now you will find culinarians and Cicerones pairing barbecued meats with a wide spectrum of beer styles including Smoked Porters, Milk Stouts, Dunkel Weizens, American Strong Ales, Saissons and other beers the typical barbecue pitmaster would find hopelessly exotic. With all due respect to the extensive training, experience and super sophisticated palates of these so-called culinary experts, they are dead wrong. The correct beer pairing for any barbecue is a Budweiser served exactly one nano-degree Fahrenheit above freezing temperature. No fancy, schmancy glassware is required, as it is perfectly acceptable to drink it straight from the can or bottle. If you insist on glassware, a frosted mug is the preferred choice. This fact is widely understood from Kansas City and Texas all the way to North Carolina, and I dare say you'd be wasting every one's time lecturing folks who've enjoyed barbecue this way for decades on proper beer serving temperatures and the pairing of contrasting or complimentary flavor profiles. The fact that beer plays a major role in bringing friends, family, and neighbors together over a simple plate of barbecue is one of the the great things about beer, even if that beer comes from some evil mega-corporation.

As a life long Chicago Cubs baseball fan, I must also give thanks to Budweiser for supporting the late, great baseball announcer Harry Caray, one of our country's national treasures, who announced the Cub games in the 80's and 90's during the time I grew up near Chicago. Harry Caray was from a by-gone era of unapologetic home field announcers who connected emotionally with Cub fans with his passion, elation and frustration over the course of each season. Today's announcers are far more distant and analytical by comparison. You could tell whether that Cubs were winning or losing just by listening to Harry's tone of voice for only five seconds. Considering how well he resonated with Chicago sports fans, he must have been an obvious choice for Anheuser-Busch to hire as a pitchman for Budweiser, and his smiling face could be seen all on billboards all over Chicago and on local TV commercials hawking Budweiser. Somehow, the constant presence of Harry Caray warmly exhorting us to enjoy a cold Budweiser had a comforting effect few grew tired of.

Harry would sometimes even announce the games from the Wrigley Field bleachers, taking the perspective of the typical fan. He blended effortlessly into the crowd on those occasions, and when he would declare to crowd around him, "Now would be a great time for an ice cold Budweiser!" it seemed so natural and genuine, even if you realized he was being paid to say that, we forgave him. At the end of each Cub game, after Harry would either cheerfully recap a Cub's victory, or more often solemnly summarize a Cubs loss, he would always sign off with an enthusiastic "I am Cub fan, and a Bud Man, and I hope you are too!"

I'm with you, Harry.

Beer of the Month: Stone Brewing's 15th Anniversary Black Imperial IPA

2011-09-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

For the month of September, I bestow the title of Beer of the Month to Stone Brewing's Imperial Black IPA. Perhaps I award them this month's title because I've found Stone's last couple anniversary ales to be pretty underwhelming. They were full of strong aggressive flavors you expect from Stone, but instead of being bold and arresting, the resulting brew was harsh, over done, unbalanced, and just plain difficult to drink.

That's not the case for this years version. There's plenty of big, bold flavors in there, but they somehow remain smooth and balanced. The first thing that hits you when you open the bottle is the aroma of whole bunch of hops. Lot's of piney, resiny hops. The beer itself has plenty of rich, malty bitter chocolate flavors and that some how melds seemlessly with all those hops. It's just this big brew full of roasty malty hoppy flavors that somehow come together and create something unique. Actually describing the flavor is a challenge and one of the signs of a great beer is that it has a uniqueness that cannot be simply summed up by ticking off flavor components or referencing other beers. So I'll just say that, rather tick off a flavor profile full of wild guesses.

Beware, as this warms up, the flavors start to get out of whack, the alcohol get more pronounced and the beer goes from sublime to barely drinkable in seconds flat. When that happened, I just put it back in it in the freeze for a few minutes to bring the flavors to balance.

Eat Real Festival: The Food Trucks Take Over

2011-09-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

The Eat Real Festival used to be one of my favorite beer festivals. It claimed to have a wider mission of highlighting enivronmetally sustainable street food, but its first edition in 2009 could be best described as a great beer festival in Oakland's Jack London Square with a bunch of funky taco trucks parked around it. The beer shed would always be chock full of all sorts of special brews from Northern California's finest breweries, and every hour on the hour, a different brewer would be on hand at the Meet the Brewers Table to pour his beer and chat away about it. It was a great way to connect the beer you were drinking from where it came from and how it was made.

So perhaps it is a sign of the festival's success that this year's Eat Real Festival was no longer a great beer festival with a lot of interesting food, but a great food festival where you can still get a pretty good beer. The beer shed was still there pouring plenty of good selections from area breweries but ones most beer geeks are quite familiar with, and there seemed to be fewer specials and hard to find brews compared to years past. The Meet the Brewers Table was an unfortunate casulty of this new emphasis.
So the rightful stars of this years Eat Real Festival all the brightly colored food trucks. For five bucks, you could get a decent bite of street food inspired by the cuisines of The Philippines, The African Continent, India, Korea, Viet Nam, Argentina, Mexico, and good ol' American Barbecue. I tried lots of it, and am not a food critic, so don't expect any culinary insights, but let's just say all the unique street foods tasted good. Especially with a good local beer.

We all know about the modern American beer resolution, but is there anything more American than the food truck revolution? It's a revolution of small scale entrepreneurs serving up food from America's melting pot as they quickly maneuver their mobile restaurants to follow the ever changing mob of customers, all the while broadcasting their location to the world via the Internet so just in case they happen to be just down the street, you can run down and get a delicious Chorizo Egg Roll.

So I can't wait until next year's Eat Real Festival, even if the beer part of it won't be what it used to be. But can we get the Meet the Brewers Table back?

Eat Real Festival this Weekend

2011-09-22T07:49:00.000-07:00

The East Real Festival has always been one of the more novel ones. You never know exactly what you'll find there, and I'll never forget the time a couple years ago when I saw a huge tattoo of a beet on a man's muscular arm, which pretty much sums up the overall spirit of the festival.

There seems to be less of an emphasis on local breweries this year, with no mention of the "Meet the Brewer" table where brewers told turns pouring their beers at a table for an hour at a time, answering questions and chatting away about there beers, or whatever. There's still going to be an impressive list of breweries. My weekend plans are still a little up in the air, but hope to see you there.

Biketoberfest Marin Returns to Fairfax

2011-09-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

I'm not a cyclist, but figure there's a few cyclists our there that read this who would be interested in the Biketoberfest Marin. Excellent list of brewers. Have to say it look's so good, I might get myself a bike just so I can participate.

Here's the press release they sent me:

A highly-anticipated annual festival, Biketoberfest Marin attracts cyclists and West Coast brewers alike in a combined bicycle expo and stellar brewfest! Held in Fairfax—the birthplace of the mountain bike—the event is not only Marin County’s premier bicycle event but is also a fundraiser for and presented by the Marin County Bicycle Coalition (MCBC) and Access4Bikes (A4B). Last year the event drew over 5,000 cycling and beer enthusiasts from all over Northern California and raised $20,000 for MCBC and A4B. Biketoberfest will feature a celebrity road ride (with "Fast" Freddie Rodriguez) mountain rides, live music, great food, family activities, a Cargo Bike Jubilee, dozens of bicycle, component, nutrition and athletic attire vendors, a women's skills clinic with Pro Catharine Pendrel, and 25 West Coast brewers serving over 40 beers! It’s a great way to have fun while helping a good cause.

WHO: Marin County Bicycle Coalition (MCBC) and Access4Bikes (A4B) Present
WHAT: Biketoberfest Marin 2011
WHEN: 11am-6pm, Sunday, September 25, 2011
WHERE: Fair-Anselm Plaza, downtown Fairfax, CA
COST: FREE Admission; brewfest tasting $25 advance, $30 day-of. Proceeds from Biketoberfest benefit bicycle advocacy in Marin County.
CONTACT: www.biketoberfestmarin.com

Tickets for brewfest: http://biketoberfestmarin.eventbrite.com/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/bikefestmarin

Biketoberfest Events:
Celebrity Ride with “Fast” Freddie Rodriguez
Cargo Bike Jubilee
Live Music from noon to 6pm: WTJ Squared, Miracle Mule, Beso Negro and Tom Finch Group
Family Activities
Celebrity women’s mountain bike skills clinic with Team LUNA Chix’s Catharine Pendrel

# # #

Full List of Participating Brewers

(as of 8.21.11):

21st Amendment
Anchor Brewing
Anderson Valley Brewing
Bear Republic
Bison Brewing
Broken Drum
Deschutes Brewing
Iron Springs Brewing
Lagunitas Brewing
Luckyhand Brewing Company
Marin Brew Co
Santa Cruz Ale Works
Sierra Nevada
Speakeasy
Triple Rock
Weed Ale
Pizza Orgasmica
Moonlight Brewing Company
Petaluma Hills Brewing Co.
Beltane Brewing Company
Ninkasi
Van Houten Brewing Company
New Belgium
Pine Street Brewery
Tieton Cider Works
Peloton Cellars (WINE)
Clif Family Winery

Brews on the Bay 2011: Peace through Beer and Mutual Hatred

2011-09-11T18:30:00.000-07:00

There was a feel good San Francisco vibe for those who boarded the good ship Jeramiah O'Brien this September 1oth for the Brews on the Bay festival. The festival is held annually by the San Francisco Brewers Guild on the Jeramiah O'Brien, a World War II era ship docked near San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, providing fantastic views of the San Francisco Bay from it's decks. There isn't a better spot for quaffing some of the finest beers the San Francisco brewing community has to offer.

And there was plenty of great beers to chose from. Perhaps since this festival has been condensed from a two-day to single day event, all the breweries had much larger selections than they have in years past. And it was nice to see Anchor Brewing show up this year. Kudos to Magnolia Pub for rolling out plenty of interesting session beers. Double IPAs and Imperial-styles seem to dominate festivals, but their skillfully brewed milds, bitters, and Kolsch session brews were a breath of fresh air. The worst beers were OK, and the overwhelming majority were good to great. But then, one of the best things about San Francisco is that its breweries always deliver great beer.

And it was a pretty chummy brewing community on the ship, with plenty of brewers hanging out at other brewer's pouring stations chatting away and sampling each other's beer. In fact, this feel good vibe was so infectious I actually had a pleasant conversation with not one, not two, but actually three graduates of the University of Michigan, including craft beer blogger and SF Brewer's Guild social media whiz Brian Stechschulte. This may not seem like a big deal, but as a graduate of The Ohio State University, we're usually more comfortable spewing hatred towards other. That's just the way it is.

Of course, a certain bond is created through rivalry, a respect gained by understanding just how deeply the other side disrespects you. There is a certain release in the controlled bloodlust of the game, but once it is over, most of us realize it is just a game and we're all just people. If we could only overcome our fears and take this same approach over matters like race, religion and sexual orientation.

So as we reflect on ten years after September 11th on the consequences and challenges of hate, I'll give the last word to the Dalai Lama, who said:

“We need to learn from our painful memories of September 11th and become more aware of the destructive consequences that arise when we give in to feelings of hatred. This tragedy in particular has reinforced my belief that fostering a spirit of peaceful co-existence and mutual understanding among the world’s peoples and faith traditions is an urgent matter of importance to us all. We must therefore make every effort to ensure that our various faith traditions contribute to build a more caring, peaceful world.”

Yes We Can!

2011-09-08T20:43:00.001-07:00

This article, co-written with Pete Gauvin originally appeared in Adventure Sports Journal.

Something new is showing up in backpacks, in mountain streams, on rafts, and even on the beach. It’s beer in cans brewed by local and regional craft breweries.

The great outdoors is often enjoyed with beer in a can, since cans are lighter than bottles, shattered glass is not a hazard, and empties can be crushed for easy transport out of the woods. Moreover, bottles are often prohibited at many outdoor locations. Plus, canned beer submerged in a cold mountain stream cools down much faster than bottles.

So craft beer in cans is good news for outdoor enthusiasts, an independent-minded crowd that generally appreciates quality local and regional brews with character over the mass-market swill from corporate breweries that sink more of their budgets into advertising than their product.

Craft brewers themselves are also enthusiastic about cans. Check out their websites and you’ll find plenty of feel-good statements about how cans are better for both the beer and the environment. Cans protect beer from oxygen and sunlight better than bottles, and are a more earth-friendly package because they are significantly lighter than glass (35% of the weight of a bottle of beer is the bottle itself), stack easily with less packaging, require less energy to transport, and are more efficiently recycled.

“I absolutely love the package. They’re like mini-kegs,“ gushes Sean Turner, owner of Mammoth Brewing Company in the resort town of Mammoth Lakes. The Eastern Sierra brewery, founded in 1995, started selling beer in cans four years ago, one of the first craft breweries to do so. “Everything out here is so outdoor oriented. We sell beer in cans to hikers, fishermen, boaters, and golfers,” says Turner, whose brewery cans three of its brews to satisfy a wide range of taste buds: Epic IPA, Golden Trout Pilsner, and Real McCoy Amber Ale.

North of San Francisco in Mendocino County there’s a similar new-found enthusiasm for aluminum pop-tops at Anderson Valley Brewing Company in Boonville. Brewmaster Fal Allen is encouraged by the new sales growth spurred by last year’s decision to release three of Anderson Valley’s more popular beers in cans: Boont Amber, Hop Ottin’ IPA and Summer Solstice Cerveza Crema.

“Canned beer is about 8% of our business and growing fast,” says Allen. “It used to be our canning line would run once or twice a week. Now it runs pretty much every day.”
While it turned out to be a good business decision, Anderson Valley Brewing, which generates 40% of its electricity from solar panels atop its brewery, was also highly motivated by the environmental benefits of cans. Cans are nearly 40% lighter to ship than bottles, greatly reducing fuel costs and their carbon footprint.

It’s been less than 10 years since Colorado’s Oskar Blues Brewery became the first U.S. craft brewery to can its product when it started hand-canning its Dale’s Pale Ale in 2002 — a hoppy, strong (6.5% ABV) and critically- acclaimed brew that no doubt shocked a few unsuspecting palates weaned on limp, watered-down, mass-market lagers.

Today, there are 117 craft breweries in the U.S. offering premium beer in cans, according to the Canned Beer Database at CraftCans.com. And more are hopping on the can wagon every month.

The First Canned-Beer Revolution

Of course, canned beer has been around for decades. The first canned beer was sold in 1935 by the Krueger Brewing Company of New Jersey, which canned Krueger’s Cream Ale and Krueger’s Finest Beer for distribution in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast. By the end of 1935, 36 breweries were using cans — which, interestingly, included Pabst Brewing, whose “PBR” in recent years has established itself as the unofficial value beer among the outdoor set.

The first cans were made from heavy- gauge steel. Aluminum cans didn’t debut until 1958.
Sounds pretty good. But such regional breweries like Krueger’s (sold in 1961) wouldn’t last in the face of competition from national breweries like Schlitz and Anheuser- Busch.

In following decades, corporate breweries with high-speed canning machines began to dominate the American beer market. Creativity, quality and distinctiveness suffered in the battle for market share and profits. In most cases, the resulting product from these corporate breweries was a thin, fizzy, watery brew with a slightly metallic taste.

As tastes evolved with the resurgence of American craft breweries in the ‘80s and ‘90s, canned beer was derided by beer enthusiasts as cheap, tasteless and decidedly low-brow. But for cans, it was guilt by association. They were unfairly judged for the character of their contents, rather than the quality of the container. And such perceptions die hard.

Indeed, for the craft-brewing community devoted to flavorful hand-crafted beers brewed in small batches, canned beer epitomized everything that was wrong with American brewing. Even when an inert water-based lining for aluminum cans was developed in the 1980s to help protect the contents from ever touching metal, canned beer could not shed its cheap and inferior reputation. The stigma persisted and was only enhanced as “micro-brewed beer” became widely available, all in bottles, initially.

Clearing the Bottleneck

So how did canned beer mature to become the new darling of craft brewers?
The unlikely transition was spurred by a micro brewery in Canada’s Yukon Territory and a small Canadian manufacturing company which stumbled onto canning beer like a bear on a backcountry campsite.

Virtually all beer in cans sold by craft breweries in North America is canned by equipment manufactured by Cask Brewing Systems out of Calgary. The company got its start selling on-premise brewing systems to small brew-it-yourself operations that allowed home brewers to come in and use the facilities to brew their own beer.

Problem was, these brewing hobbyists often poured their beer into used and poorly cleaned bottles, with the beer degrading quickly thereafter. So in 1999, Cask developed a simple manual canning system so all that homebrew didn’t get poured down the drain.

Shortly thereafter, the owners of Yukon Brewing, a craft brewery in Whitehorse, Yukon’s capital and largest city (pop. 20,500) …… a brewery “conceived like many Yukon babies — around a campfire on a canoe trip” …… recognized that about 60% of beer in the Yukon was sold in cans and wondered how they might be able to squeeze into that market.

As they looked around for canning equipment, everything they found was for large scale brewing operations dealing with far greater volumes than they could possibly brew and priced far higher than they could afford. Then they tripped upon Cask Brewing’s manual canning equipment and gave them a call.

“That’s when all the light bulbs went on around here,” recalls Jamie Gordon, a technical sales rep for Cask who’s been with the company for over 25 years. In 2001, Yukon Brewing bought Cask’s manual canning system and became the first North American small-scale brewery to sell beer in cans.

Seeing a market for small canning systems for the hundreds of small breweries then in existence, Cask Brewing Systems decided to market their system at the 2002 Craft Brewing Conference in Cleveland, hoping to make a big splash. The response went over like warm beer on a summer day.

“Everyone looked at us like we were crazy,” remembers Gordon, as negative perceptions of canned beer remained high. “One guy walked up, shook his head, and told us it was the stupidest thing he’d ever seen …… I’d like to know where that guy is now.” As the saying goes, all it takes is one — and others will follow. Perhaps no one knows this better than beer drinkers.

In this case, Oskar Blues from tiny Lyons, Colo., was looking for a way to distinguish itself from the numerous craft breweries dotting the Rocky Mountain landscape like 14,000-foot peaks, and was willing to make the leap. “We thought the idea of our big, luscious pale ale in a can was hilarious,” recalls founder Dale Katechis on the Oskar Blues website. “And it made our beer immensely portable for outdoor enjoyment.”

Only later would he and his crew discover the benefits of cans — such as better beer preservation, a lighter environmental footprint and lower shipping costs. Already a successful brewpub, Oskar Blues was mainly looking for a way to sell some extra beer. But so many campers bought Dale’s Pale Ale on their way to nearby Rocky Mountain National Park they soon automated their canning system to keep up with the unexpected demand.

Colorado’s dynamic craft brewing scene couldn’t help notice Oskar Blues’ success.
The market for canned beer for the active, outdoor-oriented consumer was no longer a secret. Coors Light wasn’t going to be the first option any more.

Fermenting Acceptance

Yet negative perceptions of canned beer continued to be hard to settle, even as more and more small breweries started selling beer in cans. In 2005 when San Francisco’s 21st Amendment Brewery decided to start selling beer to take home from their brewpub, Shaun O’Sullivan suggested to co-founder Nico Freccia to package it in cans.

“It seemed like the stupidest thing I ever heard of,” remembers Freccia, “until Shaun started explaining all the benefits of canning, and then it seemed like a no-brainer.”
Another regional brewery that rolled straight into cans is Reno’s Buckbean Brewing Company, started in 2008, which cans its Black Noddy Lager, Orange Blossom Ale and Tule Duck Red Ale.
Things really started to change when the major craft breweries got into the canning act.

In 2008, New Belgium Brewing released their nationally popular Fat Tire Amber Ale in cans. “Fat Tire in a can really validated everything we were doing,” says Mammoth Brewing’s Turner. “The negative perceptions are no longer an issue,” agrees 21st Amendment’s Freccia.

And if that validation isn’t enough to pop your bottle cap, word comes down the canning line that the most prominent and influential craft brewery in California, if not the nation, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company of Chico, plans to release its iconic Pale Ale and Torpedo India Pale Ale in cans by the end of the year.

“The number one reason we decided to do this was cans go where bottles can’t, especially on hiking trails, rafting, and other places people want to take them outdoors,” explains Bill Manley, Sierra Nevada’s spokesperson. “I’m really excited our beers are coming out in cans this year.”

One of the reasons Sierra Nevada — which founder Ken Grossman named after his favorite hiking destination — hasn’t joined the canned beer frenzy sooner is that they’ve been searching for a plastic lining for their cans that won’t absorb hop compounds over time, says Manley, which they believe they’ve now found.

For “malt forward” beers such as Fat Tire Amber Ale, which generates most of its flavor from roasted malts, absorption of hop compounds has little consequence. For Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale and Torpedo IPA, with their distinctive hop flavors and aromas, preservation of the beer’s hop character is more essential.

Though it is now the sixth largest brewing company of any stripe in the U.S., Sierra Nevada remains an environmentally conscious, independently owned business. The brewery is powered by solar energy, operates its own water treatment plant, and is the largest buyer of organic hops in the U.S. For these reasons and others, it won the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “Green Business of the Year” award in 2010. But it wasn’t going to jump into the canned beer fray just because cans are an arguably greener option without first assuring that its first priority, the quality of its beer, would not be compromised.

Just as with bottles, craft brewers realize that canned beers are only as good as the beer inside. The last thing they want is someone carrying a couple cans 10 miles into the backcountry only to be disappointed. For one, that person could be Ken Grossman.

Secondly, how far behind can freeze-dried beer be? Just tear open the foil pouch and add water. Suddenly hiking the PCT for weeks on end would appeal to a much wider audience, I’m guessing. Or perhaps not.

For the foreseeable future, though, it appears craft brewers will no longer be kicking the can down the road.

Leisurely Labors

2011-09-05T19:07:00.000-07:00

I guess there's little point in noting the oxymoron title of Labor Day, since it's a given few people work on it. Or if they do, it's work they've chosen willingly. Like a Labor Day morning 10k run.

If I had to describe how the race felt in a single word, it would be workman-like. (OK, that's two words connected by a hyphen.) World Runners, an organization trying to end world hunger put on the Labor Day race that morning in Sunnyvale Baylands Park was mostly on flat gravel trails, so there were no hills to contend with, but lots of soft crunchy gravel. In those conditions, best just to keep the arms moving, the legs churning, and work right through the course. I kept maintaining a steady pace, and passed a couple people at miles 2 and 3, but by the time I got to mile 4, it was one of those "the guy behind me isn't going to catch me, but the guy in front of me is too far away to get either" deals and so told myself to " just keep working" to get to the finish line. A 39:49 was slower than I expected to run, but then I didn't figure on being second master in the small race, so I guess I'll take that. I've got seven weeks of training to put in before the next race, the Grape Stomp Half-Marathon in Livermore. Not a lot of time, but enough to get some good runs in, get some extra tempo work on the track, and improve upon the Water to Wine Half-Marathon three weeks ago. (Why do I keep doing all these wine themed races?)

Speaking of Labor Day labors, I spent the afternoon brewing a Chile Habenero Stout. Yep, pretty ambitious to brew with chiles, especially since I'm having enough trouble brewing with malt and hops. But to my way of thinking, winging ingredients to come up with a unique, personally designed beer is a lot more fun than trying to perfect a Marzen, or copy beers already commercially available. Especially since the secret to homebrewing is spenign a lot of time cleaning a whole lot of stuff, which quite frankly, isn't a whole lot of fun, so you might as well have fun with flavors.

As for the stout, so far so good. Tasting the wort, the heat level was about where I wanted it, just a little noticeable, but not overpowering. The idea for this beer came from good Mexican chocolate, where there's plenty of flavors going on and little bite of heat at the end. That's want I'm hoping for anyway. Being a lot more confident I killed all the nasty bugs ruining my previous batches and rinsed the cleaning solution off the carboy that muddled the last brew, I'm feeling pretty confident about this one.

Brewing is a lot like running. Put in the well directed hard work and concentration and with a little patience, good things start happening.

The Session #55: Telling Us What's Inside

2011-09-02T12:30:00.000-07:00

For this month's Session Curtis Taylor of The HopHeadSaid asks us to write about our favorite beer labels.

The humble beer label must deliver so much. In a split second it has to win our attention from all the other labels fighting for it as our eyes quickly scan the shelf. Once the bottle is discarded, the best labels are easily remembered to do this job even more effectively the next time we glance in their direction. And while creating these impulses, the label must somehow visually convey the taste and feel of the beer in our throats.

I have zero artistic talent and know little about psychology, so don't have the foggiest notion of how this works.

But I'll take a stab at it. My favorite labels are not necessarily the most elegant, pleasing, or arresting artistic compositions, but those in their own unique unforgettable style leave me well prepared for what I'm about to drink. Don't ask me how these labels do it, they just do it. Look at two of my favorite recently released beer labels below. Which bottle do you think contains a celebration of bold aggressive flavors balanced on a razor's edge, and which holds a subtly complex combination of flavors mingling together from the farms of Sonoma County? It's obvious from the labels, right?

San Diego Truth in Advertising Part 3: The Beer Company

2011-08-31T16:20:00.000-07:00

Walking around downtown San Diego one night last week, looking for a place for, I spot a place on the corner called The Beer Company. It must have opened less than a year ago, since I didn't remember it being there last year. Intrigued, I walk in, sit down at the bar, and look at the list beer selections written on a chalk board, which consist of the usual Blond Ale/Pale Ale/IPA/Stout/Lager/Belgian Ale/ ect. tick list of styles. The interior is perfectly manicured light brown brick and mortar look, with fancy brass fixtures and an impressive looking stone bar table. I can't help notice all the young slender waitresses zipping around in tight black skirts with lacy trim.

One of the black skirts stops in front of me and asks "What'll you have?" Seeing me struggling to come to a decision, she tells me "You should get the sampler, that's what everyone gets."

I can't remember the last time I had a sampler flight at a brewpub, but it somehow makes sense and so order that. I then look around and nobody else one is having a sampler flight.

I work through the sampler flight drinking one maddeningly competently brewed beer after another. Each beer is true to its style, and is creative and imaginative as The Beer Company's name. I silently hope one beer actually tastes bad just to break the monotony, but no such luck. Now I could see myself enjoying a pint of any of these beers, but just can't remember any of them. I order the grilled salmon, and when it arrives, it has this dill sauce on top that tastes great. Finally.

If anyone asks about The Beer Company, I will say "They make beer."

San Diego Truth in Advertising Part 2: The Best Damn Beer Shop

2011-08-30T15:15:00.000-07:00

The Best Damn Beer Shop isn’t actually a stand alone beer shop, but simply the beer section in an otherwise slightly worn, nondescript grocery store on a quiet downtown street called Super Junior Market. But then, the beer section takes up one whole third of the grocery store.

I figured on finding plenty of great examples of San Diego County’s great brewing scene I couldn't’t get in Northern California after finding this place on an internet search. What I didn’t count was finding stuff from Oregon or even New Zealand I couldn't find anywhere else.

How this indescribeably expansive beer selection got here seemingly defies the laws of economics and even physics. I now have some idea how the people who first stumbled upon the Grand Canyon must have felt.

San Diego Truth in Advertising Part 1: Stone Brewing's Punishment

2011-08-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

I spent last week in San Diego at a trade show that I’ve been going to for years so by now I pretty much have the whole week's drill down. Monday is set-up day, and I fly in and help get things set-up in our booth at the exhibit hall and then go back to my hotel. Apparently, the beer gods were smiling on me when I made me hotel reservation on Priceline since of all the places that could have accepted my bid, it was at the Comfort Inn in the Gaslamp District almost directly across the street from one of the best beer bars in America, The Neighborhood, a bar full of artsy, counter culture décor including its trademark portrait of dreamily reverent of Jesus Christ about to bite into a hamburger.

I make my way to the Neighborhood in the early evening and they just starting to pour a new release from Stone Brewing called Punishment. Punishment is made with Stone's Double Bastard, their Imperial version of Arrogant Bastard which they then age in Oak Barrels, and then finally add a bunch of different chili peppers straight from owner Greg Koch’s backyard garden to it. My first reaction upon hearing how it was made was to completely avoid it, but as I quietly sipped a sweet and malty Hair of the Dog Adam, a nagging curiosity overcame my better judgment and I ordered it next.

At first sip, the beer has a wonderfully heavy, luxurious, apricot fruitiness mellowed by the smooth oak and then POW! the chili peppers kick in and overwhelm everything before slowly dissipating as the beer slides down the throat so you can repeat the same experience for the next sip.

This is not a beer you can really enjoy with food, or drink to unwind, but seems brewed merely for brewing sake. It is not a beer to be enjoyed, but to experience Stone masterfully manipulating strong flavors to simply to tease and trick you.

The next night, curiosity gets the better of me again, and I have another Punishment just to reaffirm my thoughts on this whole brewing exercise. I don’t want to have this beer a third time.

The Power of Pace on a Beer Run in Sonoma Wine Country

2011-08-18T17:30:00.000-07:00

The big question in last weekend's Water to Wine Half Marathon held in Healdsburg, CA is "Was it worth it for Alderbrook Winery?". That's because Alderbrook hosted the post-race festivities which included free wine tasting, presumably to encourage many of the runners to actually purchase some of their wine. Perhaps this is news to Alder Brook, but most half-marathon finishers are fighting dehydration, have at least one body part hurting pretty bad, and often feel like puking. This is not an ideal time to be sipping a Chardonnay and appreciating its various subtle nuances and complexities, so you have to wonder how successful this little marketing idea was.

But hey, I've got to hand it to Alder Brook for putting on a good post-race show, with some tasty rice and beans on hand and a reggae singer so cool, polished and smooth, he could probably turn a Megadeath cover into a feel-good song you could grove to. And since my wife Linda and I wanted to help a race sponsor out and we liked Alderbrook's wines, we picked up three bottles the day before the race with our race packets. (I must admit to having an alter-ego that likes a good glass of wine from time to time.)

As for the race, it started at the base of Lake Sonoma dam and wound through picturesque country roads over gently rolling hills past several vineyards and wineries before finishing at Alderbrook just outside of Healdsburg, with a net elevation drop of 100 feet. After recovering from a bout with bursitis in April that knocked me out of the Santa Cruz Half Marathon, then going through a personally stressful period in June and July that affected my training. Having completed a number of runs of 7-12 miles around 7:00-7:10 minute per mile pace that were pretty challenging, I was just hoping to break 1:30, about 6:52 per mile pace.

The correct pace for a half-marathon based on fitness level is a deceptively comfortable one, and my biggest fear going into the race was going out at "only 6:40" pace, and then staggering in the last few miles. So the day before, I drove over my local high school track, and ran a 6:48 to get a get a good feel for target pace. At one point, I ever close my eyes while running, just to focus on rhythm and cadence. Then, I also did a few 40 yard stride-outs in my bare feet, which as I found out in a recent tempo work-out helped focus to form and kept my feet feeling fresh.

And wouldn't you know on race day, every time I looked down at my watch at each mile marker, I had just knocked out the last mile in 6:45-6:50 pace. By mile four, it was a little unreal, and I wondered if the mile markers were somehow wrong. No big hills certainly helped for uniform pacing, and I slowly marched through the field through miles 2 through 7, but after passing a guy struggling up a small incline, I could see no one ahead of me. I blitzed through downhill ninth mile in 6:36, but otherwise kept ticking off each mile in 6:45-6:50 even with no one in sight to run with. But since the course always went one way or another, or gradually up or down, the course itself gave me something to focus on.

I finally saw a couple runners way ahead of me at mile 11, and was reeling them in, but not fast enough before the race ended. I crossed the finish line in 1:28:41, which is 6:46 pace. One of the best paced races in my life and also one of the best times relative to my fitness. It's not a coincidence.

But the really big news was that Linda set her PR in 2:16:49, just under 10:30 mile pace, a pace not too long ago she couldn't maintain for a 10k. Was her PR due to good pacing as well? We'll never know for sure, since she can't exactly recall her mile split times, but she remembers her early miles just under 10:30 which is right where she should be. She undeniably earned her PR for all the hard work she put in weeks before the race, and she should be proud of what she accomplished, even if she keeps saying she runs like a turtle.

And with all due respect to all the excellent wineries in the area, the only proper way to celebrate Linda's half-marathon PR was with a few good beers. So we headed on over to Healdsburg's Bear Republic Brewing.
Bear Republic is best known for their Racer 5 IPA, the classic West Coast IPA where the hops dominate with the malt mostly an after thought. But go to the brewpub, and you'll get a much different appreciation for Bear Republic, where believe or not, the malt often takes center stage.

This was certainly evident in the first beer I tried, the Peter Brown Tribute Ale, named after a former sales manager for the brewery who passed away nine years ago. It was impressively clean and smooth, brewed with molasses and brown sugar that blended seemlessly with the light coffee flavors and nuttiness of the malt. And who says Bear Republic cannot make a balanced IPA, as Linda enjoyed their Endeavor IPA, with "only" 65 IBU's which had a lovely soft, biscuit-like, and lightly fruity hop character, which Linda and I prefer over Racer 5.

Speaking of Racer 5, they serve a Black IPA version of it here, called Black Racer, where the coffee-like like bitterness of the malt melds with the bitter hops creating a very bitter, yet mellow and easy drinking experience. Finally, Linda and I split a Racer 10, a Imperial IPA version of Racer 5 for "dessert". I'm beginning to appreciate why so many West Coast style IPA's taste even better in Imperial form, as the extra malt and associated sweetness just seemed to give the hops an extra juiciness and fullness.

So remember for your next race, conservatively figure out the right pace you should run, keep the mental discipline in the early miles to keep that pace, and fight like hell at the end. The beer will taste even better.

Beer of the Month: Summer 2010 by Almanac

2011-08-15T07:30:00.000-07:00

This review is really a sham, because I just don't have the guts to trash this beer. That's because Jesse Friedman, one of the co-founders of Almanac is such a revered figure in the Bay Area Beer Blogging world. He created the highly influential Beer & Nosh, full of gorgeous photography, clever yet economical prose, and plenty of hip culinary insight before becoming an honest to goodness professional brewer by founding Alamanac Beer with Damian Fagen. I would face likely beer blogger banishment and excommunication if I even dared whisper a bad thing about Alamanac's inaugural release, called simply Summer 2010, for the time of its inception.

It's a citra hopped, golden ale, aged for months in oak red wine barrel with four, count 'em, four varieties of Sonoma County blackberries thrown in for good measure. To me, this all sounds dangerously like too much is going on, and I expected this either to be something really good, or turn into some horribly over done monstrosity.

And so it was an awkward moment when I first tasted Summer 2010, and was rather underwhelmed by it, as all I could really taste was a lot of toasty malt and little else. But there lies the beauty of this beer, as my first sips were of it chilled, right out of the refrigerator. As it warmed, all sorts of new flavors started to emerge. First some punchy red wine flavors, then a little bit of oak, and then some very delicate notes of blackberry could be teased out of each sip as it gradually warmed. While the conventional wisdom is that beer should be brought to temperature before serving, I found it more fun drinking it this way.

So while saying bad things about this beer could be dangerous to this blog's survival, you'll just have to believe me when I tell you all the layers of subtle flavors really work together to produce something unique and intriguing. Trust me on this one.

The label suggests that this beer pairs well triple-cream cheeses, roast pork, and grilled stone fruit. I guess so. Frankly, I find beer pairing to be a black art, so I'd take their word for it. Like all beer, it also goes well with pizza.

Have they inspired me to take my homebrewing professional? Uh, no. Given my rather modest and sometimes undrinkable homebrews, I'll stick to blogging and running, and let the guys who actually know how to brew go pro. And I honestly can't wait to see what they do next. Their first act is a tough one to follow. Whether or not they can meet or exceed the high standards they've set for themselves, it seems every one's curiosity is peaked just to watch them try.

Water to Wine Half Marathon This Weekend

2011-08-11T18:18:00.000-07:00

This weekend my wife and I venture into the wine and beer country of Sonoma County to run the Water to Wine Half-Marathon, which starts at Sonoma Lake and finishes in Healdsburg, CA, a net elevation drop of about 100 feet. I'm not in bad shape, I'm not in good shape for it, but since vertraining earlier this year in preparation for the Santa Cruz Half Marathon, my goals for this race are rather modest: Get to the starting line in decent shape, go out in a manageable pace, and leave enough to fight like hell for the last three miles.

I may be older and a lot slower than back in the day, and my goals and motivations for running and racing have changed. But one thing I've come to realize is the day I stop getting hyped for a race is the day I die.

And while I appreciate Alderbrook Winery sponsoring this race, I just don't think I'll be in the mood to sip a glass of wine after crossing the finish line. Instead there'll be a Racer 5 from Healdsburg's Bear Republic Brewing with my name on it.

Almost barefoot running.....and living to tell about it

2011-08-09T19:30:00.000-07:00

OK, so after this morning's tempo workout on my neighborhood high school track, I got this wild idea to take off my shoes and run a few 40 yard accelerations on the football field in my socks. It was an AstroTurf field, so it wasn't exactly running barefoot through the woods. But I thought it might be a good way to wind down a three miles of tempo running to help recover, and dare I say it, it really worked.

My feet felt refreshed, getting lots of cool air without running shoes getting in the way. And without shoes, I could really focus in on form and stride as I gradually increased my foot speed over the 40 yards. I did this only four times, but I felt a lot better after ending the tempo workout this way than if I just trudged home.

I've gone on the record as opposing barefoot running, and while this doesn't actually count as barefoot running, it is making me go "hhhhmmmmmmm".

Is this the beginning of a transformation into becoming a bare foot running?

Cultural Destruction and Discovery on the High Desert of New Mexico

2011-08-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

I have a word of advice for anyone planning to go running in Las Cruces, NM in late July. Head out early. Or really late. If you don’t hit the roads before 8 am, expect to be running in 90+ degree temperatures until late into the evening.

While in New Mexico visiting the in-laws, these morning runs turned out to be an ideal opportunity to get what my high school coaches call ‘climatized” for an upcoming half-marathon in Sonoma County. I don’t expect half marathon conditions to be anything like the furnaces of Las Cruces at 8 in the morning, so banging out some miles on the hot roads seems like an ideal way to be prepared on race day.

What I wasn’t ready for were all the changes long time Las Cruces establishment High Desert Brewing. I had last been to High Desert Brewing 2 ½ years earlier and back then in the back adorning the restroom entrances was the finest collection of Elvis portraits on black velvet West or East of the Mississippi. And now they were gone. It is no exaggeration to say that this loss of this critical artwork was the brewpub cultural equivalent of The Louvre being nuked. I finally got an explanation from High Desert's sympathetic dishwasher, who told me the velvet Elvis’s were removed when the walls were recently painted, and for some unexplained reason, were not returned to their places. In fact, all the walls were white and largely barren. I remember the walls and even the ceiling of the place covered with snapshots of smiling people, either on vacation or happily drinking a beer, and now these were gone with the exception of one small corner of the ceiling.

Somehow, these barren walls didn’t affect the neighborhood vibe of the place I remembered from the last time, or the high quality of the beer either. Linda and my favorite was the rich and roasty red ale which High Desert calls appropriately enough "Red Ale". We also recommend their tasty IPA and Dark Bock beer, which High Desert apparently sees no point in giving a name to either.

I’m willing to bet snapshots will start creeping along the walls, covering them in an organically ad hoc fashion again. On can only hope the Elvis paintings will be restored. Our dishwasher friend gave us one last word of advice before we walked out the door: "Give Marble Brewing a try." Since he selected a Cramps CD for the evenings background music, I carefully heeded his words, as his taste was clearly impeccable.

And try Marble Brewing we did. It turns out this brewery in nearby Albequerque makes a pretty good IPA, with its bready malt standing up to the strong, slightly fruity and grassy hop goodness which hit the spot after an afternoon cooling off in the backyard pool. Marble Brewing apparently sees no reason to give their IPA a name, either.

A day at White Sands National Monument sliding down bleach white sand dunes in snow disks and grilling burgers went even better with Marble Brewings Red Ale. It's pretty hop forward red ale, with the caramel malts coupling with a decent amount of Crystal, Cascade, and Simco hops to create a favourable and slightly astringent brew.

I have no reason why brewers in New Mexico simply call their beers "IPA" or "Red Ale" and seem to have no interest in naming their particular interpretation of each style with the goofy puns or alliterative place names favored by most breweries. But then an cooling off with an "Illegal Alien Ale" or "White Sands Wit" does seem rather out of place here. It's a beautiful, but harsh and unforgiving land and not a place to start getting cute and fancy.

The Session #54: You say it's sour like it's a good thing

2011-08-05T05:30:00.000-07:00

This month, Jon Abernathy of The Brew Site takes The Session into the surprisingly uncharted territory of sour beers.

I’ve brewed a couple sour ales. Problem is, they were not supposed to taste sour. Some unwanted bug landed into some of my recent home brews making them taste like somebody poured a bottle of vinegar into the carboy, a rather harsh reminder that successful brewing is a lot more about maintaining clinical sanitation practices than it is about creatively crafting a killer recipe. Sourness is something I try to keep out of my home brews.

Sourness also seems to have a bit of an image problem. Having sour grapes is not a good thing, and it generally not nice to tell someone to “go suck on a lemon”. We do not usually call our loved ones “vinegar” or “citric acid” and instead use words like “honey” and “sugar”. And so it must be no simple trick for brewers to harness the often unpleasant taste of sourness and turn it into something drinkable, even enjoyable, let alone convince paying customers to actually try it.

I hadn’t ventured into sour ale territory much until a few months ago when my wife and I went out with some friends to a sour ale tasting night at the Rose & Crown, a small pub shoe horned into a stone building just off the main drag in downtown Palo Alto, CA. All four of us ordered seven glasses, each of different sour ales and past them around for everyone to try. We enjoyed most of the selections, but curiously enough, each of us had a different favorite that was often the least favorite of someone else. Perhaps injecting sourness into a brew not only requires a difficult balancing act, but any brewer going to that trouble isn’t going to please everyone, no matter how skillfully done. But then, what do I know about sour ale since I generally avoid anything with the word “sour” in it.

So for this month’s Session, I decided to once again to brave the world of sour ales. The first one I tried was Ichtegam’s Grand Cru Flemish Red Ale I picked up at my local grocery store. Perhaps what drew me to this sour ale was that it came in a small bottle, so if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t be pouring all that much of it down the drain. The good news is that didn’t happen, as I enjoyed the flavors of dried fruit, figs, a light malty toastiness, and only a light sourness which combined to produce an enjoyable brew. This was no flavor explosion, but a pleasant, easily quaffed beverage that would go well with any simple dinner. (Don’t ask me to get all culinary here and give you a bunch of foods to pair this with, as I would simply be making a bunch of wild guesses.)

Having survived that, it was time to move on to another one, and I courageously selected one that came in a larger bottle, Echt Kriekenbier from Belgium’s Brouwerij Verhaeghe, a Belgian ale aged in oak barrels flavored with cherries. Simply pouring this beer in the glass was worth the considerable price of the bottle, as this simple act created all sorts of great cherry aromas. As for the taste, there’s nothing really complicated about it. It’s mostly just lots of sour cherries and lots of oak, which is pretty good if you ask me. This was a great find.

So thanks to Jon Abernathy at The Brew Site and for further broadening my horizons to realize that sourness is not always a bad thing. Just as long as it doesn’t creep its way back in my home brews.

Running not to the drama, but from it

2011-07-27T20:30:00.000-07:00

Most of the time, I need a little more drama. And running is often where I find it. Earlier this year, with my training going well, I started to press harder in my training hoping to pop a good time at the Santa Cruz Half-Marathon. Instead, I popped the bursa sac in my right hip, and watched the race instead. It was frustrating, but I have few regrets. Injuries are an unfortunate part of running, and the high and lows of running provide a certain drama often missing in the humdrum of normal life.

But lately, life has become too dramatic. Let me count the ways. A large public held company announced it will buy the company I work currently for, which last year bought my previous employer. (Are you following this? Sorry, it probably isn't wise to mention names here.) Days later, several of my co-workers were effectively laid off. Oh, they got offers to relocate hundreds of miles away to new jobs, but I don't think anyone will take the offer. While my boss assures me that my job is safe and I think he's right with my position pretty solid, its hard not to go around with my ears wide open listening for the next shoe to drop. My brother-in-law has not been so lucky and lost his job in these difficult and uncertain times.

Adding to that is that I'm involved in a child custody with my first wife. It isn't wise to discuss these things in detail on the internet, but suffice to say, I wanted more time with our kids, and she opposes that, and she is trying to move the kids significantly further away from me. We aren't agreeing about any of this, which is why we are in litigation. These things are typically ugly and complicated, and since our ten year old son has autism, that doesn't make it any easier. I've had enough of this drama.

So surprisingly, running has become a source of stability and predictability from all that. The morning routine of going out the door and getting a few miles is a source of solace from all the external stresses outside my control. My wife and I are running the Water to Wine Half-Marathon on August 14th in Healdsburg, an easy course which starts at Lake Sonoma and drops 200 feet with no major hills along the way to finish in Healdsburg, CA, home of Bear Republic Brewery. And while it's course meant for running fast, I have no ambitions to run the best time possible. Well, at least I'm trying to keep my competitive juices and impatience in check for the race which for me is no small accomplishment. A successful race for me will be just knocking out the first few miles at a very easy pace, maybe picking it up a little in the middle, finish strong, cheering my wife in, and then savoring the moment with a Bear Republic Racer 5.

We all need a little drama, and sometimes running often provides it, sometimes it shelters us from it. Funny thing about drama, it always seems to work out in the end, often in ways we don't expect.

The San Jose Giants are now my favorite baseball team

2011-07-24T16:40:00.000-07:00

When my wife and I took our kids to the first base ball game to see the San Jose Giant's beat the Visalia Rawhide last night, I found my a new favorite baseball team. Can any baseball team in the majors or minors boast a better beer selection than San Jose Giants serve at their stadium? Seriously, you can find Sierra Nevada (Pale Ale and Summer Fest), Gordon-Biersch (Czech Pilsner and Marzen), Lagunitas IPA, Heineken, and the ever ubiquitous Budweiser and Bud Light at a stadium that seats maybe 5,000 people.

And in their own unique way, Lagunitas actually makes stadium restroom advertising a welcome sight.

My favorite baseball team used to be the Chicago Cubs. My high school years in the early 80's were spent in the Chicago area, and I learned at that young age that being a Cubs fan isn't as bad as it sounds, since the team keeps your expectations so low they cannot logically disappoint you. But somehow, the Cubs always find a way. The Cubs are always bad, but this year they're really bad, and having lived 2,000 miles away from Chicago for over eleven years now, it just time to give up the long suffering Cub fan thing. (My wife claims this long suffering Cub thing is in my blood and I'll never get rid of it. I hate to admit she's probably right.)

Before I moved to Chicago in 1980, my favorite baseball team was the Toledo Mud Hens, who played near my home town of Bowling Green, OH where I grew up in the 70's. The great Mud Hen's of the 70's like Joe Lis, Cardell Camper, and Vassie Gardner mean little to even the most knowledgeable baseball fans, but they were my heroes as a boy. Vassie Gardner even taught me how to field a ground ball in a Little League clinic. The times Dad would take me to see the Mud Hens game were were memories any kid growing up should have.

And so it was time to pass on that favor to my kids yesterday, and my wife and I took them to their first game hoping to create the same great memories for them. And I learned something. These are memories any father should have, too.

Beer of the Month: Hop Juice from Two Brothers Brewing

2011-07-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Beer of the Month is Hop Juice, a Double IPA from Two Brothers Brewing I discovered on vacation taking my wife and kids to visit my parents where I grew up in Oak Park, IL, located just outside of Chicago. We also visited my brother and sister in-law in nearby Naperville. While a family trip is not an ideal time to go beer hunting, I did have a moment of male bonding with my brother-in-law at a Binny's. Binny's is a big box chain of beverage stores, the Midwestern equivalent of BevMo!. I heard a lot of good things about Two Brothers from my dad and brother-in-law, so when seeing their Double IPA through the windows of one of Binny's upright fridges, I grabbed one curious to see how it would compare to all the West Coast hop monsters back home.

Pretty damn well if you ask me. It's a blitz of fresh, intense hops flavors dominated by grapefruit peel, with a little tangerine in the mix that's well balanced by a slightly sweet malt. What really distinguishes this one was all the bright hop flavors that go done smooth, unlike a lot of hop bombs which can be rather harsh and astringent. I'd be willing to bet if you got a bunch of Pliny the Elder bottles, filled them up with this beer, capped them, and gave them out, no one would catch on. It really is that good.

Two Brother's Brewing was founded by, you guessed it, two brothers Jim and Jason Ebel who founded the brewery in 1996 following their home brewing aspirations. Located outside of Chicago in Warrenville, IL, I had a few of their other beers during the vacation, and every one of them was at least "pretty good" or better so you definitely want to check these guys out if you have a chance. The care and passion you expect from a family business really shows in their beers.

Speaking of families, my ten year old son Brandon built those Lego models of the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Building in the picture. Give him a Lego model and he gets very quiet and focused following the directions to build it, a certain strength drawn from his autism. My eight year old daughter Verona is more into art, and became an expert in identifying Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture in my home town of Oak Park, where Wright designed several houses. My new wife Linda has been great for the kids, and for me. Brewing or otherwise, families are precious.

Advice to California Brewers: Get Your Beer into a California Cafe Beer Dinner

2011-07-17T10:50:00.000-07:00

Anyone who's tasted my homebrews lately knows I have little advice to give to California Brewers, so I just have one thing to say them: Give California Cafe in Palo Alto a call. They'll further elevate your beer by creating a great dinner out of it. Last nights beer dinner featuring Drake's Brewing was yet another hit in their recent series of dinners.

I've been to other beer dinners held at California Cafe, but just haven't written much about them. I rarely write about beer from a culinary angle since I generally don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Of course, ignorance rarely stops most people from talking authoritatively about things and that's not going to stop me here either. So here's a brief recap of last night's event.

As in the usual format, California Cafe's Executive Chef Mark Pettyjohn created a four course menu with a dessert, each course pairing with one of Drake's Beers for about 35 of us that evening. Dow Tunis, Drake's Sales Manager and twenty-five year veteran of the Bay Area craft brewing scene, talked about each beer, drifting around to each table over the course of the evening to chat, answer questions and hear what we all had to say about his beers. Turns out Dale used to hang out at one of my favorite watering holes on the Peninsula, Marvin Gardens, an unassuming little shack next to the train tracks in the industrial part of Belmont that always has a nifty little tap list.

Anyway, back to the dinner. Since I saw Peter Estaniel of the BetterBeerBlog across the room furiously scribbling down notes and taking a bunch of pictures with his phone, it's a good bet a full deconstruction and in-depth analysis of the evening on his blog is imminent, so if you want to get the culinary low-down from someone who actually knows what he's talking about, check out his blog.

I'll just rave a little about the lively course of Pan Seared Alaskan Cod, pancetta and fingerling potato ragout, and a sweet corn-port sauce served with the unlikely pairing of Drake's super intense Denogginizer Double IPA.
I expected the Double IPA to totally blow away a light fish like cod. Somehow, that didn't happen. Instead, the sweetness from creamy corn-port sauce, the saltiness from the pancetta, and the hoppy bitterness from the Denogginizer all were highlighted by the mildness of the cod, creating an energetic mix where each bite tasted differently and all the different flavors found a way to get along.

The following course took a completely opposite approach. A House Cured and Smoked Pork Loin with coffee risotto and spiced cherry sauce was full of smokey, earthy flavors, and blended seamlessly with the roasty coffee flavors of Drake's Drakonic Imperial Stout. What a great warm and cozy course this turned out to be.
True to the name of California Cafe, only breweries from California are celebrated in this dinner series. Next up is 21st Amendment on August 25th. I'll see you there.

Check out this new running blog......

2011-07-10T17:32:00.000-07:00

I discovered the running blog Science Based Running a couple weeks ago written especially for training junkies like myself. With so many sources of running advice of there, some of it I find highly dubious or driven by some hidden agenda, it's reassuring to find a source based on peer reviewed research. So I highly recommend you check it out, even if my world was turned upside down by one of their recent posts.

My Latest Home Brew is Barely Drinkable!

2011-07-07T20:30:00.000-07:00

There's a saying that anything worth doing is worth doing badly. I can brew pretty badly. Even worse, I malign my own kids while doing so, as my latest versions of Verona's Coffee Porter and Brandon's Brown Ale had all sorts of odd, sour tastes most likely due to some lax sanitation practices. One of the things about home brewing is that you learn that the art of brewing is not so much about romantic ideals of developing great recipes or creative use of ingredients, but mostly about just keeping the damn brewing equipment clean. And if you've ever seen my desk or closet, you know that's going to be a big challenge for me.

So I attempted to clean the bejesus out of everything to make my last brew, a simple Pale Ale, and was just hoping for something drinkable. And the good news, the sour taste the plagued the last couple batches is gone! The bad news is, the brew tasted rather muddled, and most likely some residual cleaning solution and chlorine got into the beer which likely contributed to its muddled, murky taste, which could best be described as malted ice tea. That's a small victory, if you want to even call it a victory, but I'll take it at this point.

All this effort to brew something that I might actually enjoy is creating a new found appreciation for the talents of all the great brewers out there. I began to fully appreciate the amazing accomplishments of world class distance runners after years and years of hard work still left me hopelessly behind runners that world class runners left hopelessly behind. Of course, finishing a race well back in the pack has its own rewards. Drinking crappy beer is pretty horrible.

Running teaches the value of persistence, so I'll just keep at it, and eventually, the hard work will pay off. Drinking your own bad beer is pretty hard work.

The Session #53: Epiphany Redemption

2011-07-01T05:59:00.000-07:00

For this Session, John Holl of Beer Briefing tells of a long, negative experience with a brewery only to find out later in life, the brewery wasn't directly at fault, and actually made some great beer. From this experience he asks us to write about a beer or brewery that in our minds, has some how earned beer redemption.

If pressed to give the time of my craft beer epiphany, I would have to say it was a Memorial Day Weekend trip to Mendocino in 2007 I took it with my girlfriend Linda. She suggested we go to Mendocino County as a compromise of sorts, since it was a good region for wine, her libation of choice, as well as craft beer, which I was starting to discover. We visited Anderson Valley Brewing in Booneville, and then North Coast Brewing up in Fort Bragg the next day, and from then on, I realized beer was not simply some beverage sold by businesses, but it its highest form was a complex concoction brewed in a multitude of styles and a natural extension of the place and people it comes from. From those days onward, the beer really mattered.

That was not the only epiphany that weekend. Linda and I had such an effortlessly enjoyable time on our first vacation that there was obviously something pretty special between us, and today we’re married.

There was yet third epiphany that trip, one I don’t have very good memories about, and it is this: Some craft breweries make bad beer. I’m afraid our visit to Ukiah Brewing that weekend was one downer of the trip, the downer part of the trip that made the rest of it seem so special.

Maybe because the brewpub seemed to try so hard, yet fail so spectacularly was what made the whole experience so memorable. The service was both friendly and forgetful, the food both creative and clunky. As for their organic beers, you could tell they had their heart in the right place, trying to make honest, earth friendly beers from simple organic ingredients, but the best ones were well below average. An organic lager tasted like it was filtered through a bale of hay. The other brews were either watery or had odd tastes, nothing like the wonderful sounding descriptions on the menu.

Since then, I haven’t seen much of Ukiah Brewing, and the place faded into an odd memory of that time, until Linda and I took a day trip to the Santa Rosa Beer Festival a month ago since we wanted to check out some of the great breweries to the north of the San Francisco Bay. As we got into the cramped and maze-like exhibit hall, who should we notice peeking out from one of the out of the way corners but Ukiah Brewing.

I suppose they have been doing something right, or they simply wouldn’t have stayed in business. And since the festival format was one of unlimited pours into our tasting glasses, Linda and I figured we’d give Ukiah another try, at least for nostalgic reasons. If the beer was like we remembered it, we could simply nod, smile, wander away, and once we were out of their eye sight, simply dump the beer into the trash someplace.

We cautiously approached their stand, and asked for the young rustic looking blonde serve for a taste of something called Navarro Yellow, and of course, she just had to ask, “Have you heard of Ukiah Brewing?”

We carefully told her that we had been Ukiah Brewing before, without going into the awkward details, and we started asking questions about her since there wasn’t anyone else in line, hoping to change the subject. Turns out she hadn’t working at Ukiah Brewing that long long, maybe a year after moving to Ukiah from Montana, which was a bit of a relief since she couldn’t have been one of the guilty parties that night.

And then Linda and I both first tasted, if my memory is correct, a gruit of all things called Navarro Yellow. What a wonderful light, refreshing brew with some sort of floral herb in it, a great antidote for all the heavily hopped barrel aged monsters lurking around the festival. Their other sample was a their Doppel Dunkel Weizen, a great blend of roasty, chocolate flavors and banana esters. At least that the way I remembered them, since scribbling down tasting notes would just spoil the moment. Perhaps we are giving them too much benefit of the doubt, but we honestly thought those were two of the best beers of the festival.

Finally, I just had to ask, “Have you gotten new brewer recently?”

“Why yes, we have. He started four months ago and he’s a lot better than our last one.” With that, Linda and I felt comfortable to spill the whole story about the time we went to Ukiah and thought the beers were pretty bad. And as you might expect, she had already heard different variations on our story several times. I should add that our friend from Ukiah (neither Linda or I remember her name) told us the new Ukiah brew master is named Mitch Parent, and either Ukiah Brewing hasn't put his name up on the website, or something else is going on.

At any rate, we chatted for a few minutes long after we finished our beers, and told her as we finally left that we looked forward to visiting the brewpub again. And we actually meant it.

And so for this Session, I ask you to raise a glass to Ukiah Brewing, who has earned some badly needed and well deserved redemption.

Beer of the Month: Immigration Red Ale by Knee Deep Brewing

2011-06-20T06:15:00.000-07:00

The Beer of the Month of June is bestowed upon a beer from Knee Deep Brewing I discovered at the Santa Rosa Beer Festival this June 4th. Whenever finding an unfamiliar beer at a festival, I make a point of asking where it's brewed. After inquiring the festival volunteer pourer the bottle in front of him with the initials "IRA" in big colorful letters, he picked up the bottle, squinted at the label, and finally informed my wife and I, "It says Belmont, California." That was a surprise to us, since Belmont happens to be our home town on the San Francisco Peninsula.

As I suspected, the beer is contract brewed by Belmont's Devil's Canyon Brewery. Knee Deep collaborated earlier this year with Devil's Canyon and The Beer Wench to produce Ryedentity Crisis, a sensational Saison brewed with rye with great subtle berry flavors. It's one of those special beers that on the first sip, made me freeze, raise my eyebrows, and exclaim "Wow!" out loud. It could've easily been Beer of the Month a few months ago.

So I decided to give whatever was in the bottle labelled "IRA" from my home town a try, never mind the fact that the whole point of driving nearly two hours to Santa Rosa was to sample all the great beers brewed in Sonoma County. But then, just where is Knee Deep located anyway? Best I can tell, it's contract brewed at Devil's Canyon and possibly other locations given its scattered distribution along the West Coast, so there doesn't appear to be a definitive "there" for Knee Deep.

As for Knee Deep's beer, it turns out the initials "IRA" stand for Immigration Red Ale, the name Knee Deep has given their Irish Red Ale. It's a curious label choice, as "IRA" are also the initials of the notorious Irish paramilitary resistance group the Irish Republical Army that fought in an often violent enthno-religious-political conflict in Northern Ireland that started in the late 60's and lasted thirty years known as The Troubles. An Irish Ale with "IRA" on the label may seem like an act of defiance, but more likely is merely a sign of the forward march of civilization, as the largely pacified and disbanded paramilitary group is but a distant and increasingly forgotten legacy of more contentious times, with "IRA" signifying nothing more than a beer's name.

Oh yes, this is supposed to be a beer review, which means I'm supposed to tell you how it tastes. Tasting is always a bit of a challenge at a beer festival, where brewers often try to one up each other with hop monsters, barrel aged specials, and unique beer styles full of strong flavors and sampling just a few of these beers inevitably leads to palate fatigue. And yet the straightforward composition of roasty toasty and earthy flavors that somehow blended seamlessly into a very smooth drinking beer distinguished it from a very distinguished group of beers at the Santa Rosa Beer Festival. But this time I didn't freeze and say "Wow!". It was more like a pause, and then I exclaimed to my wife "Mmmmmm", which is still good enough to earn Beer of the Month status.

Knee Deep Brewmaster Jeremy Warren is a pretty young guy, having graduated from University of Nevada-Reno in 2006, but he's already won a bunch of awards and can demonstrably brew some excellent beer. If he ever decides to settle down and establish a brewery somewhere, I hope he builds it in Belmont, California.

Is Greed Environmentally Good and Other Questions from "Yes We Can!"

2011-06-09T07:34:00.000-07:00

The history and business stories of canned beer discovered while writing Yes We Can! pretty fascinating, and raise a number of interesting questions. Here are few that came to my mind as I wrote it.

Can greed be environmentally good?
I couldn't help notice that every brewery I talked with distributed their beer into cans primarily as a business decision to expand their markets. Reducing their environmental impact was a secondary motivation. I believe each brewery's management genuinely cared about the environmental consequences of their operations, and certainly many of these business are quite "green" but at the end of the day, the old business objectives of increasing revenue and cutting costs drove the decisions. Maybe if environmental awareness becomes part of a business's DNA, good business decisions are by extension, good environmental decisions.

Is "The Innovator's Dilemma" alive and well in canned craft beer?
I absolutely love the story of Cask Brewing Systems stumbling into a successful business by developing a small, manual canning system that was originally designed to serve an extremely limited market. Today, they can't build their canning equipment fast enough for all the small breweries looking to get into canned beer. These simple, cheap canning systems that seemingly had no market, yet became a lucrative business recalls the idea of "disruptive technologies" as described by Harvard business Professor Clayton Christensen in his ground breaking book, The Innovator's Dilemma. Christensen noted that many disruptive business technologies take root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors. Craft beer itself can be considered a "disruptive technology" an idea I outlined in an earlier post, and this certainly sounds a lot like what is going on with Cask Brewing Systems.

Cask Brewing's small manual canning systems would seem to have a very limited market 10 years ago that no larger manufacturer of brewing equipment would likely have any interest in. But now, their small scale approach seems well positioned to grow in a North American brewing industry where most of the growth is in small craft breweries which looks at bottled beer increasingly less favorably. Perhaps the fact that Sierra Nevada will be using a European competitor that manufactures smaller scale canning systems in European breweries suggests a certain limitations to Cask Brewing System's growth.

Did Dale Katechis bet his company putting beer into cans?
I unfortunately never got to speak with Dale Katechis for this article, and my questions were referred to his marketing person instead. I really want to know what drove his seemingly risky decision in 2002 to put Oskar Blues Pale Ale in a can. Given the highly negative perceptions of canned beer at the time coupled with what had to be a serious investment of time and money for a brewpub to install the first automated small scale canning line, it certainly seems like a "bet the company" move. The was actually no guarantee that Cask Brewing Systems could pull off an automation line in the first place, since they had no prior experience with volume manufacturing equipment. Of course, it's quite possible Katechis simply predicted the future a lot better than everyone else, but its hard not to conclude it was a big gamble. There seems to be a lot more to the story than just the "Dale likes to go against the grain" statements plastered all over the Oskar Blues website that his marketing guy answered repeatedly to virtually every question asked. Maybe someday we'll find out something more.

Yes We Can! My Canned Beer Article Written for Adventure Sports Journal Hits the Street

2011-06-04T06:29:00.000-07:00

When I started writing an article on canned craft beer for Adventure Sports Journal, I figured it would turn out to be another one of those, "it's good for the beer, it's good for the Earth, lot of brewers are doing it, yadad-yada-yada" kind of stories. But it turned out to be more of a business innovation story that took a few surprising twists and turns.

I really have to thank editor Pete Gauvin for going to bat for the story, and making sure it would run in the June/July issue, as evidently there was some talk about waiting until the August/September issue to run the story. Pete also added a few facts and flourishes to the text, and re-wrote my rather horrendous ending to the article. Pete modestly claimed he was only patching a few holes in the walls of the house I built, but he did a lot more than that, and I asked him to give himself co-author credit. I'm rather proud of what we accomplished, which you can find online here.

The story raises a few interesting questions, which I'll discuss in a few days in an upcoming post.

The Session #52: What Does the Stuff Lurking in our Closets Say About Us?

2011-06-03T06:15:00.000-07:00

For this Session, Brian Stechschulte of All Over Beer has asked us to write about our beer collectables. I danced around the question.

I find this months Session on beer collections putting me in a surprisingly self-reflective mood. Perhaps considering how little we can carry with us travelling through this world, our collections of non-essential items represent the things we cherish and value, the things we don't want to leave behind. Some proudly display their collections in a prominent place for the world to see, but most often these collections spend most of the time in a dark closet, possibly for reasons of storage convenience, but more likely to hide a certain obsession or fetish from others we only want to reveal to a trusted select few.

So what do I have collecting in my closet? Running T-shirts heaped in a big pile. Most are from races I've run over the past 5-10 years. There's the few odd ones, like my bright red Jolt Cola T-shirt I've kept from my college days back in the 80's. Whenever it was time for a big workout or long run at a key point in my training, I'd put on my Jolt Cola t-shirt to give the workout a needed "Jolt". I scammed this shirt from the Jolt Cola company by sending them a letter, saying my first name was "Joe", telling them my friends called me Jolting Joe because I drank so much Jolt Cola and suggesting it would be in Jolt Cola's best interest if they would send me a T-shirt and get a little free publicity. A week later, a package came back in the mail with the Jolt Cola t-shirt with a letter from a nice marketing lady telling me she loved my story. If it were only true.

My name isn't Joe, and my only claim to fame with Jolt Cola was creating a mixed drink called a "Gin and Jolt" which consisted of one can of Jolt Cola with a nearly equal quantity of Gin. I became a bit of a legend in my dorm, or at least I thought I was, by guzzling this stuff on Saturday nights with a bunch of other guys on my floor who didn't have much going on that night either. Gin and Jolt was every bit as mind-bending and nauseating as it sounds, a precursor to the currently notorious Four Loko, except it tasted a lot better. The Jolt Cola T-shirt is a product of a brief, happy time where I both ran and drank pretty hard.

Another notable shirt in my collection is my 1992 USA Olympic Trails Marathon T-shirt. The Olympic Trials Marathon involves over a hundred really fast American marathoners who've run a certain marathon time to compete for the honor of representing the United States in the Olympics. In 1992, this race was held in Columbus, Ohio where I was going to graduate school and on that day I rode after the runners on my bike as they raced all over the city. I was so pumped up from the experience I decided right then and there to make a four year commitment to qualify for the 1996 Olympic Trials Marathon, never minding that I hadn't even run a marathon yet. Understanding I had zero chance of making it all the way to the Olympics, I just wanted to be in the big race and technically have a shot at being an Olympian. Two years later with three marathons run in times nowhere close to the Olympic Trials qualifying standard, reality started setting in about my Olympic Dreams, and I reluctantly gave them up. I did plenty of runs in that t-shirt, and those big Olympic dreams carrying me to more modest running accomplishments. This stretched out, faded and worn t-shirt is as shot as my Olympic chances were, but it still reminds me of certain audacity and innocence of that time.

The rest of the T-shirts in that big pile are from various races, big and small that I've ran over the years. Each one represents a running milestone, a small story. Some represent a major running effort and focus for a big race, others just a early season fitness test, and still others just some fun Sunday morning spent running around some neighborhood as part of a local fund raiser, one of those small races that have a neighborhood intimacy that large races like the Boston Marathon or Bay to Breakers cannot capture.

But this Session is about beer collectibles, not running collectibles, and as you might have guessed from my lengthy avoidance of the actual Session topic is that I have no beer collectibles to speak of. Just a couple glasses from beer festivals, 3-4 beer T-shirts that were gifts, and I had a stack of beer coasters from different bars and brewpubs stashed in a kitchen drawer but I think I must have recycled them, since I can't find them anymore. I suppose I could trot out of few of these random beer trinkets as my "beer memorabilia collection", but that just didn't seem all that interesting.

Maybe it's because these race t-shirts represents a small running story, often associated with a lot of hard work and effort while a beer trinket represents, well, drinking a beer, which in most cases, doesn't require much work.

OK, I admit my choice of collectibles seems a bit odd. Most of us want to remember all the good times, even if those times involved nothing more than drinking a beer, and most recall their running experiences about as fondly as a trip to the dentist. Looking back at what I've collected, the good times were those when I experienced extreme fatigue, felt like puking, and ended up smelling really nasty. But come to think of it, a couple of beer festivals also turned out to be like that.

Now I don't want to veer too deeply off into self-psychoanalysis, especially since I paid a pretty good therapist a lot of money for that a few years ago during a particular tough time in my life, and I'd rather not go back there. But I recognize my peculiar personality and when I look at the things I've collected over time, it's more than a little bit like looking in the mirror.

So I ask for this Session, take a good look at your collections, beer related or otherwise. Is that you?

We All Need a Crew to Run With

2011-05-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

There's something about living the romantic ideal of the lonely distance runner that wears thin after a while. Yes, there's a certain feeling of accomplishment waking up in the wee hours of the morning to grind out a few miles all by yourself before going to work each day. But over time, toiling in obscurity day after day gets monotonous and boring, no matter how hard you try to shake things up.

Back in my high school and college days on the track and cross-country teams, there was a whole bunch of people to run with. Running together and pushing each other to greater heights was a big part of what made running on a team great. After my school days were over, there would be times I'd join up with a group of runners on regular basis, usually meeting on the track or on the trails for some pretty hard work-outs. These small training groups were pretty fragile. What kept them together was everyone was at roughly the same ability and dedication level. Inevitably when there'd be injuries, changes in jobs or family life, or some would decide to back off of running for while, a few months later we'd all start going our separate ways and the workouts would fall apart.

But during those brief fleeting moments, some pretty strong bonds were forged between us silently as pushed each other on the track, with little more than a breathless "Nice job" when the workout was over before we'd to jump back into our cars and drive off to rejoin for the real world. As much as I miss those days, getting up really early in the morning to bash out a bunch of intervals on the track or storm up a bunch of hills on the trails no longer sounds all the inviting. Strangely, a morning spent with my wife and kids eating pancakes and sausage for breakfast sounds a lot better. But the day I stop running is the day I die, so I still keep at it, going it alone most mornings.

But now, I've found a good crew to run with, having recently joined the Palo Alto Run Club. It's a little more casual than the harder core training groups I've run with, and we meet during the evenings, which I appreciate since having my alarm clock waking me up 5:15 am to go running is not something I'm going to miss. But lest you think these guys are soft, I've met some of the nicest, friendliest guys who can grind me into a pulp on the roads. Of course, before and after hitting the roads, we talk about races and runs, not to mention other random subjects that come up when a bunch of people get together. Running with others helps push you to great heights you couldn't reach running by yourself. Running all by yourself with no one else around will eventually drive you insane.

One of the things I enjoy about running is in a race, you're on an island fighting the masses to the finish line, only relying on yourself to get the job done. Of course, this is why a lot of people hate running. But thankfully, we don't live on islands alone in this world. There are others to pick us up when we need it, to share experiences, and even exchange in odd inane banter that is part of being human. Which is why we all need a crew to run with. I'm thankful I've found one.

The Session 51.5: It's An Aged Wisconsin Cheddar Battle Royale

2011-05-19T20:00:00.000-07:00

For this special Session, Jay Brooks of Brookston Beer Bulletin fame has asked us to try the beer and cheese pairings selections from the great Session beer and cheese pair-off and pick a winner.

Now it gets intense. After giving it their best shot, some great beers have fallen by the wayside. Only the surviving champions remain to fight this epic battle. A lifetime of drinking beer and eating cheese has prepared me for this very moment, so stand back because I'm about to announce the Ramblings of a Beer Runner Session Beer and Cheese Pairing Intergalactic Champions!

Well, sort of. I cannot possibly buy all the beers selected in the Session's first rounds. Even if I could find and purchase all the beer listed for all three cheeses, my wife Linda and I didn't think it was a wise career move to call in sick two weeks straight working our way through all the cheese pairings, and then gleefully posting the results on the Internet for everyone, including our bosses, to see. We tried to pair up with some of our friends to help us out with the final decision, but unfortunately our schedules didn't match so well, and those plans fell through. So Linda and I soldiered on, focusing on the aged cheddar cheese pairings, since we thought these were the most intriguing variety of beers selected by Session participants. So with our leftover slab of 3-Year Aged Wisconsin Cheddar cheese, and yes, I know this isn't the "official" Aged Wisconsin Cheddar Cheese for The Session, we picked three beers selected by other bloggers to rumble with the beer we picked in The Session's first round. After an evening drinking beer and eating cheese, we picked our winner . So without further ado, here is the line-up for The Aged Wisconsin Cheddar Cheese Battle Royale.

The Combatants

Speakeasy Brewing's Payback Porter
The tall, dark, mysterious stranger hiding in the shadows was Jay Brooks's pick. Would his shady underworld connections strike fear in the hearts of his opponents, giving him the edge?

Firestone Walker Union Jack IPA
This precocious IPA from the rustic bucolic wine town of Paso Robles, CA was the choice of Sean at Beer Search Party. Union Jack might play well in the sticks, but how would this country boy do when it got to the big city?

Paulaner Hefeweizen
The Thirsty Pilgram declared this beer a cheese slut. Could she overcome her much stronger flavored competitors through crafty seduction and allure to take victory back to the beer fatherland of Munich?

Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA
Our champion we picked in the first round, fresh off its victory over a furious Bear Republic Racer 5. This big bad strong brew from the East Coast was primed and ready for fresh blood to take the title!

Let's get ready to rumble!

The first thing Linda and I noticed is that Paulaner Hefeweizen goes with cheese the way a wheat cracker goes with cheese. Sure it works, but it just isn't all that exciting. Its banana fruit esters likely blend well with many cheeses, but they weren't working all that well with the cheddar. Linda and I appreciated the pairing, but found it a bit underwhelming. As this point, I am tempted to try and write a clever and witty sentence combining the words "my wife and I" and "cheese slut" but common sense tells me this isn't a good idea. So instead I'll just declare Paulaner Hefeweizen will have to shack up somewhere else!

Next up was Speakeasy's Payback Porter. Porter is one of my favorite styles, and Payback Porter is one of my favorite porters, so I was quite curious how it would pair with cheddar. One sip of all those intense, roasty coffee flavors reminded me why I like this beer so much. Problem was, all those great strong flavors overwhelmed the cheese, and clashed with its tanginess. As much as we appreciated the great beer, the pairing just didn't work for us. Payback Porter gets whacked!

So it came down to Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA and Firestone Walker's Union Jack. Two muscular IPA's going mano a mano in a hop fueled death match! We liked both pairings and it was really close, with both of going back and forth about which one we preferred. In the end, it was the sweet malty goodness of the Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA that was its undoing. The pairing seemed a little heavy, the cheese feeling a little flabby in the mouth. On the other hand, the bright, intensely floral hops of the Union Jack coupled with its light malt character really blended well certain elements of the cheese, but each maintained its own unique character. Each seemed to do its own riff on a common flavor theme like an experienced jazz duo. Union Jack takes the title!

We learned a lot from this little exercise. The little nuances and characters of each beer is really enhanced when paired with cheese, and we often chose a beer over one we normally like better, the lesser beer creating a better flavor experience when mingling with the cheese in our mouths. For all the IPA's we tried, the flavor profile of the hops made a huge difference on how the beer paired, and sometimes, the flavors clashed badly. I wouldn't be surprised to find a slightly different tasting cheese resulting in a completely different set of pairing results.

But most important, we learned that when it comes to beer and cheese pairings in the relaxed and open spirited beer community, where culinary elitism is rare, just have fun with it.

Beer of the Month: Tilted Smile by Uinta Brewing

2011-05-13T15:15:00.000-07:00

Haven't we had enough Imperial somethings? The thought certainly crossed my mind as I stood there in a liquor store, looking at a bottle of Uinta Brewing Tilted Smile standing there in the upright cooler, which advertises itself as an Imperial Pilsner. I'm trying to figure out what an Imperial Pilsner would taste like. Budweiser on steroids? That doesn't sound so good.

But I was intrigued enough to try it. Uinta was a brewery I was familiar from a few trips to its home state of Utah, and their Belgian Ale was a slick, nifty brew. I tried garlic ice cream once, never to do it again, but thankful I can tell the tale of the day I tasted it. Maybe trying an Imperial Pilsner would be the same experience.

To my pleasant surprise it was actually a great, unique change of pace beer. It's got a slight heftiness from the malt, with light peach or grape flavors, that's well balanced by savory, sage-like herbal hops. It tastes like white wine that's been dry-hopped, even though that veers into garlic ice cream territory.

Tilted Smile, which checks in a 9% abv, is part of Uinta's Crooked Line series of stronger, experimental beers. It's a bit of a business risk for Uinta, as this Utah brewery can only sell these beers in its home state through the highly regulated Utah State Liquor Stores.

I like breweries that take risks. Just as long as they don't make a Garlic Imperial Pilsner.

The Session #51: Stumbling Through the Session Beer and Cheese Pair-Off

2011-05-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

For this month's Session, Jay Brooks of Brookston Beer Bulletin fame has asked us to find our best beer pairings for three different cheeses in the great Session beer and cheese pair-off.

Asking my opinion about beer and cheese pairings is like asking a blind man about sculpture. I just don't have the senses and faculties to describe the complete artistic experience, only bits and pieces of it. Beer has never really interested me for its culinary value. Instead, it's the history, economics, geography, and sociology surrounding beer drives me to write about it, not to mention I like to drink it. But of course, plenty of people write authoritatively on stuff like history or economics despite barely understanding those subjects, so I probably shouldn't hesitate to write about beer and cheese pairings, even while hardly knowing what the hell I'm doing. And this Session seems to embody the egalitarian nature of beer, where everyone can contribute and there's none of the negative elitism that seems to surround other beverages, most notably wine. (Which I also like to drink.)

So here goes. And I've enlisted my wife Linda to help with these pairings who often provides helpful advice when my thoughts go astray. In fact, she often advises me on all sorts of subjects, whether or not I've actually asked her for help. So what I did was pick two similar beers to pair with each cheese. I read a little about what the "experts" had to say about what beers pair well with the cheeses Jay selected for the Session. Then I picked a couple beers in the recommended style, and then Linda and I spent three evenings trying each cheese with their respective beer pairings, picking the winning beer in a head to head comparison. Here's the results.

Maytag Blue: Anchor Brewing Old Foghorn vs. Lagunitas Gnarleywine

The general wisdom seemed to be that blue cheese pairs well with barleywines. So it seemed obvious to pair Maytag Blue Cheese with Anchor Brewing's Old Foghorn. After all, if there was no Maytag family, there would be no Fritz Maytag, and if there was no Fritz Maytag, Anchor Brewing would likely be out of business decades ago. And it fairly safe to say if there was no Fritz Maytag to rescue Anchor Brewing, there probably wouldn't be Lagunitas Brewing either.

I couldn't taste much of a difference between the two pairings until Linda noticed the Gnarleywine being sweeter, contrasted better with the tang of the blue cheese. Then I began to notice that the more intense tasting Lagunitas barleywine held up better to intense flavors of the Maytag Blue than the Old Foghorn, where both the beer and the cheese just tasted flatter by comparison. So I had to admit my wife had a good point. I just hope that doesn't go to her head.

The verdict: Lagunitas Gnarleywine

Three Year Old Aged Wisconsin Cheddar: Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA vs. Bear Republic Racer 5

I went to at least five high end grocery stores looking for Widmer One Year Aged Wisconsin Chedder and came up empty, so finally settled for something from my neighborhood grocery store cheese section labelled "Three Year Old Aged Wisconsin Cheddar". Choosing two beers to pair with an aged Wisconsin cheddar was even a bigger challenge. It only seemed logical to pair a Wisconsin cheese with beer from Wisconsin, but it is not easy to find Wisconsin beers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since the Green Bay Packers won this year's Super Bowl, I contemplated some sort of football pairing, but really couldn't come up with anything that made sense. Then I figured since Wisconsin is in the center of the United States, it would only be logical to test how cheese from the center of the country would pair from beer on the East and West Coasts. And least logical to me.

Since a few great beer culinary minds suggested IPA's go well with cheddar cheese, I picked an IPA from each coast. While the IPA is a hoppy beer style, East Coast IPA's tend to be more balanced, with the malt contributing to the flavor and the beer having a more rounded bitterness, while IPA's brewed on the West Coast tend to be unbalanced, with less malt and more hops with intense floral and citrus flavors. And thus over time, IPA's from the East Coast and West Coast gained reputations for their distinctive styles. It's a lot like East Coast and West Coast rap music, except no brewers have gotten shot over it.

Speaking of rap, Dogfish Head owner Sam Calagione is known to grab the mike and bust a few rhymes. And yes, his awkward raps on beer, which take unfunkiness to stratospheric levels are amusing when taken in extremely small doses. Thankfully, he's a lot better at brewing, and Dogfish Head's 90 Minute IPA is one our favorites, a great example of the East Coast style with rich, slightly sweet maltiness balancing plenty of smooth bitterness. Challenging from the West Coast is Bear Republic's Racer 5 IPA, brewed with whisper of malt that's no match for all its piney, grapefruity hoppy goodness. So who wins?

We both found the sweetness of the Dogfish Head IPA contrasted well with the tang of the cheddar cheese, and while the cheese also blended well with the beer's rich, smooth character. One the other hand, the intense hop character of the Racer 5 clashed against the cheddar's tanginess, the resulting conbination not working particularly well. The East Coast and bad rap prevails!

The Verdict: Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA

Cypress Grove Humbolt Fog Goat Cheese: Anderson Valley Brewing Brother David's Tripel vs. 21st Amendment Monk's Blood

I suppose Humbolt County should be known for its towering redwoods, breath taking coastal vistas, and vibrant artisan community. But mostly, it's known as a place that grows some pretty good dope. So it seemed natural to pair cheese from this region with a beer from a place also known for good dope, Mendocino County, and a beer from where a lot of dope is consumed, San Francisco. And since fruity Belgian Ales are often recommended beers to pair with goat cheese, Brother David's Tripel from Anderson Valley Brewing and 21st Amendment's Monk's Blood figured to be good choices.

At first, I found the Brother David's Tripel to be the better pairing, as its aromatic crispness really seemed to intensify with the goat cheese. But while Linda preferred the Brother David's Triple over the Monk's Blood straight up as a beer, so found the Tripel overwhelming the cheese, while the fruitier Monk's Blood matched the cheese's intensity, and created the classic fruit and cheese combination. She declared the Monk's Blood to be the better pairing. And you know, after further consideration, my wife was right. Admitting that in writing can be dangerous.

The Verdict: 21st Amendment's Monk's Blood

Even though I barely knew what I was doing, this was a lot of fun. I might even stick around for Session 51.5.

Beer of the Month: People's Porter from Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing

2011-04-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

For the month of April, the Beer of the Month is bestowed upon Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing's People's Porter. It seems appropriate with Earth Day having recently come and went, that an organic brewery should get the nod this month. People's Porter isn't their most popular beer, but it's my favorite of their regular line-up.

And maybe because it's got coffee in it. Lots of coffee. There's plenty of coffee aroma with this brew, with the coffee flavor a strong, but not dominant, component in the beer's highly roasted malt flavor profile, which gives way to a slightly grassy and herbal finish.

People's Porter is a great accompaniment for reading revolutionaries. (The book in the picture next to the beer is The Communist Manefesto, but you probably can't read that. I don't know what's worse, my photography skills, or my heavy handed symbolism.)

Do It Yourself Doctor Needing Directions

2011-04-14T17:45:00.000-07:00

It must be one of those guy things like not asking for directions. Every so often, some part of my body breaks down from running and rather than seeking professional help, I attempt to self-diagnose the problem.

It's inevitable really. If you're trying to push limits, you're going to hit a few breaking points. When that happens, you need to back off and figure out what the problem is so you can fix it. After years of reading books, talking to other runners, and stealing advice from physical therapists whenever possible, analyzing my own personal pains and injuries has become second nature.

For example, I can tell if that pain in my left knee is my reoccurring tendinitis just by the way it feels, which I can take care of with some ice, or if the pain something else that might be more serious and difficult to deal with. I'm often poking around my hamstrings and calves, looking for tight or sore points to massage or stretch out. And there's this irritation in my index toe knuckle that ofter flares up at the end of most long runs. This happens a lot, and if I just give the toe a gentle twist, the joint will emit a soft "pop" and things feel a whole lot better.

Of course, to really figure out what is wrong, you really need to see a professional. But of course, I really do not have the money or time to see one pretty much every week or so as do most people. So lots of runners simply resort to being their own amateur doctor out of necessity, figuring out what the small pains are and working to keep them under control. So when someone asks "Don't you think you should see someone about that?" as they watch me limp around, my stubborn response is "Nope, I'll be fine. This is just part of running." I usually don't need directions, even when I am a little lost about what's going on with my body.

But a couple weeks ago, from both misdiagnoses and overzealous training, I screwed up my right hip real good. Of course, at first I figured the initial soreness was a little strain which I could work out with some stretching. But that really didn't help much. But figuring if I was careful, I could do a couple hard runs before the Santa Cruz Half-Marathon, and then back off, the soreness in the hip would recover in time for the race and everything would be fine.

I don't need to tell you what happened. My right hip got real bad, too bad to run without badly limping around, and my reward for all that stubborn hard work was standing around watching half-marathon I should've been running in. Checking a running book chapter on injuries, my new self-diagnoses on my hip was a stress fracture, which requires about two months of rest, no running to heal. Crap.

So even I finally gave in and had someone look at this who actually knows what he's doing. A genuine doctor. One who knows that the hip is a very strong bone and that stress fractures in it are very rare. Of course, my wife who works in a hospital told me the very same thing a few days earlier, but do you really think I'd pay attention to her on this? The doctor also noticed the two general areas I pointed to where the pain was the worst happened to be the very spots where bursa sacs are located in the hip, which pretty much sealed the deal on it being bursitis. They took hip x-rays anyway, but didn't find anything. Sort like when they x-ray my head.

And one of the few times in my life, I'm glad to be wrong. And since bursitis takes maybe a couple weeks to heal, I'm thrilled to say my problem is bursitis. Sometimes, when all is lost, you finally give in to reason over pride, and pull out a map, sometimes you'll find a great shortcut.

A Knock Out in Santa Cruz

2011-04-10T18:30:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my right hip, I took this picture of the start of the Santa Cruz Half-Marathon. Of course, I was planning on running this race, not taking pictures of it. Don't know what exactly is wrong with the hip, but it's screwed up pretty good. Since it seems unrelated to any particular range of motion or muscle action and is aggravated mainly by putting weight on my right leg, I fear it's a stress fracture. Hopefully next week my doctor can tell me what's going on.

It's simply amazing how quickly training can turn from great to disastrous. Four weeks ago, I ran a 5 mile race hoping for a time in the 31:00-32:00 range, and popped a 30:27. Things kept rolling, and eleven days later on a cold, windy rainy morning, I covered four miles of tempo running on the track at sub-6:10 pace in these difficult conditions, well below my 6:20-6:30 target. But then three days later, feeling a little tired going into a 15 mile timed run where I was shooting for 6:50-6:55 pace, I completely ran out of gas at 9 1/2 miles before staggering to the end. That's when the right hip soreness started getting noticeable, so I took a couple days off, did a couple light runs, before taking one big final 12 mile tune-up before the half marathon. The hip felt fine, and I stopped at miles 1 and 4 to check for any soreness or stiffness, but it felt good and while it stiffened up a little around miles 8-9 before subsiding, I ended the 12 mile run strongly, enthusiastic I was ready for the half marathon and my hip problem licked.

Except for a couple hours later, all I could do was stand awkwardly on my left leg with my right leg helplessly dangling from my torso. It's gotten better, albeit very slowly, but running a half marathon on it was likely going to end up in disaster, and quite likely some really nasty long term injury. I don't regret the risks I took to get to the starting line in what I thought would be the best shape possible. They were calculated risks that just didn't work out. This, unfortunately, is part of running.

Running is not like a Rocky movie. Just because you work hard and want it really bad, that big bad mean dude can still clock you with a right uppercut in the first round, and it's all over. Such is life.

But sometimes the good guys still win. My wife Linda worked hard for weeks too, and ran her personal best that day for the the half-marathon. So see, if you just hang in there and keep swinging, you still have a chance to take the bad guy down.

A good thing about drinking beer is that it requires very few functioning body parts. So a small consolation from being injured and not starting the Santa Cruz half marathon the next day was that I could have that extra beer without concern for any race day repercussions. So when Linda and I rolled into town, we first stopped at Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing for a pint and midday sandwich. The small tap room seemed a little spruced up from the last time we were there, and as always, a cross section of the diverse and slightly funky Santa Cruz population cruised through the place to get a growler fill or enjoy a pint for themselves. Hands down, our favorite for the afternoon was the Chile Chocolate Stout a special release available only from the tap room. While we both appreciated the dark chocolate flavors in the roasty malt, its rich character and slight sweetness, what really got us was it's mouth numbing tingly chile zip. The chile wasn't subtle, and for some people not particularly balanced, but for us, it was perfect. We also tried a sample of their barley wine aged 8 months in Chardonnay barrels. I thought the vanilla and Chardonnay flavors the barrel aging brought to the malty, toffee-like barleywine was rather interesting, but wasn't sure that the final product worked. Linda was sure it didn't.

Later that evening, we went with a friend for dinner at a place on Santa Cruz's West Side called burger. where oddly enough, you can order a burger from a wide ranging, eclectic menu supplemented by a tap list of no fewer than 48 beers. The Syd Barrett Burger I ordered was likely named for Barrett's legendary wide ranging and ultimately damaging experimentation with hallucinogenic substances, since it was topped with mushrooms. At least that's my guess, since I had to explain to the two twenty-something ladies behind the counter who Syd Barret was. There was a time explaining who Syd Barrett was made me feel cool, but now, it just makes me realize how old I'm starting to get. As for the beer, they have a few local favorites such as Santa Cruz Ale Works Red IPA complimented with the usual California craft beer suspects like Sierra Nevada, Anderson Valley, Green Flash, and Port Brewing was a few solid imports thrown in for good measure. If you want to get a good organically grown grass fed burger, yummy sweet potato fries, and a good beer, there's no better place to go than burger. But if you only have a half-hour to get a burger, you'll probably have better luck with the McDonald's across the street.

For Linda's Half-Marathon PR celebration, we headed over to Seabright Brewery where the outdoor patio that sunny day was filled with tired but jubilant runners adorned with their finisher's medal around their necks. Some of them were even limping around as badly as me. Linda and I started off with the The Freak Pale Ale, named in honor of San Francisco Giant ace Tim Lincecum. For a Pale Ale, both the malt and hop levels were as wispy as Lincecum's slender build, but for that late morning, light caramel flavors with a tea-like and slightly earthy hops made for a rather refreshing brew. Keeping with the San Francisco Giants theme, I also tried the Say Hey Wheat, their filtered wheat beer. Crisp and clear, with a nice wheat tartness and light citrus note, I could see why this was a popular post-race beer with many of finishers on the patio. And extra bonus points for Seabright not serving it with the standard lemon per my request. Linda finished with Seabright's Amber which had the requisite roasty malt and earthy finish one finds in a good amber.

As for you, Santa Cruz Half-Marathon, I am not finished with you yet!

Going Legit with a Gig on California's Adventure Sports Journal

2011-04-07T06:48:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about writing a blog is that there's no pesky editor telling you what to do and you can write whatever you feel like. One of the worst things about writing a blog is that there's no pesky editor there to improve your work, or suggest a direction many readers would be interested in. So I'm pleased to announce this little writing hobby of mine has taken a new step as I start as a contributing writer for California's Adventure Sports Journal, which published both online and (gasp!) in print.

And the best thing is that the magazine's editor Pete Gauvin doesn't do pesky very well. And it's hard for me to argue with his publication's tag line "Earn your beer" as beer drinking, I've learned, is rather pervasive in a lot of outdoor activities besides running. There's truly been a good exchange of ideas between Pete and I which will lead to a lot of good future stories. It's a cliche' to say in these situations, but he truly has been great to work with. Hopefully I'll reward him by bring more readers to his publication. It's also nice that he pays for what I write.

My first article for California's Adventure Sports Journal is a slight reworking of a previous post on barefoot running which you can read here. There's also a little write-up I did on Anchor Steam to start a series of beer reviews from local California breweries we'll be calling "A Beer Worth Earning". California Adventure Sports Journal can be found in many Bay Area sporting goods stores, especially those with extensive hiking, biking, camping, and other gear to enjoy the great outdoors such as REI.

But worry not, dear reader, this blog isn't going anywhere. I'll still be posting away here, although more likely with an emphasis of quality over quantity, and the posts will take more of a running and outdoors direction. Being associated with an actual print publication rather than simply being yet another will likely gain additional access to people and information, resulting in better and more informative writing here.

I expect a lot of great things to emerge from this new collaboration with California Adventure Sports Journal, and it's big step. I'm not some schmuck with a blog anymore. I'm now some schmuck with a blog who sometimes writes for the California Adventure Sports Journal.

Guest Posting on the Groucho Sports Blog

2011-04-06T06:29:00.000-07:00

I'm am proud and thankful Groucho Sports invited me to be a guest poster on their blog. Amber Carter of Groucho Sports asked me write something aligned to their company, "which is mostly how to balance the love of endurance sports with other things you've got going on in your life". Since I'm all for that, I was glad to contribute. You can read it here.

The Ramblings of a Beer Runner Social Media Experiment

2011-04-02T20:06:00.000-07:00

I'm no Internet neophyte. I've been sending e-mails since the late 80's. I actually know what Lynx and Gopher were. And long before it was a multi billion dollar company hopelessly trying to keep up with Google, I was using Yahoo to look up websites way back when it was on the Stanford University website as intrepid Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and Dave Filo were building it. So of course I'm keeping up with the latest Internet trends no later than 2-3 years after everyone else seems to have adopted them.

Like this Twitter thing. I still don't get the point of how or why it works, despite a few people patiently explaining it to me. The problem is, I'm starting to run into people who communicate via Twitter, and have no way to receive their messages. I'm like my Grandmom, who wonders why everyone but her gets pictures of her great grandchildren, not realizing it's because everyone else but her has an e-mail address to receive them electronically. I'm getting comfortable growing into old fart-hood, but I'm not ready to identify technologically with Grandmom quite yet, so figure it was time to get a Twitter account. I won't let a little thing like not understanding the point of Twitter stop me for using it. So if you're into that thing, you can follow-up me @rambling_oa_br.

And now a Ramblings of a Beer Runner is on Facebook. I would like to say the main motivation for this is to reach out to my readers, break down the barriers of time and space to bring people together in a spirit of beer and running harmony. The truth is actually based on vanity and ego. I would rather have more people read what I write than less, and Facebook is another way for people to find this blog and keep up with it. Yes, a Facebook page does allow me to get to know my readers a little more directly, and vice versa. You will not be faulted if you don't necessarily think that's a good thing.

So will these new forms of social media bring us all a little closer and help us understand everyone a little better, or will it lead to even more time wasted on the Internet? This is not intended to be a trick question.

The Session #50: The Multi-Billion Dollar Question

2011-03-31T19:15:00.000-07:00

For this month's Session, Alan McLeod of A Good Beer Blog asks us to answer the seemingly simple question of How do they make me buy their beer?

I've been in sales for fifteen years, and believe it or not, have no idea how to answer this month's session question. Perhaps this is because I sell laser diagnostic equipment, which as you might expect, is a lot different than selling beer. This equipment is sold to businesses, governments, and universities, and the underlying concept of selling it is rather simple. These customers are mainly trying to build a laser, or something with a laser in it, and use this equipment to put together whatever they manufacture faster, better, or cheaper. To sell this type of equipment, you have to demonstrate, often with a customer trial, that the system will generate the results the customer is looking for. Often, there are other factors such as the accuracy of the results, how easy the equipment is to use, and of course, what it costs. The customer then decides whether or not the equipment is worth the investment. Of course, other vendors may be involved in the sale, so the decision can boil down to how well each different system does what the customer wants, and what each system costs to get that performance.

Despite what sounds like a straightforward technical evaluation, plenty of unpredictable emotion and other factors usually enter into the decision. The customer may want to the equipment to solve a quality issue he doesn't want anyone know about, or had a bad experience with a similar product she doesn't want to repeat, or was told to fix a problem by his boss and doesn't want to admit he has no idea what your product does or if it will actually solve the problem. Things like this are actually common and in most cases, the customer doesn't want to reveal too much, making it hard to get to the root cause of the buying decision. Which means the real buying decision is hard to figure out, or the decisive factor in making the sale is never understood, even by the customer. A good salesperson will cut through a lot of the vagueness, unpredictability, and elusiveness in the buying process, but in my opinion, there's plenty of uncertainty as to the ultimate buying factors in a technical sale.

And so with this experience of all the uncertainty surrounding dry, technical buying decisions, the retail buying experience of something like beer, which has a lot more personal experience and emotion attached to it, seems infinitely more complicated to describe. So I hope you'll understand that when Alan McLeod asks "How do they make me buy their beer?" my only response can be "Do you freakin' think I have a clue?" Now of course I know what I like and what I don't like, and could give a reasonable explanation why. But consider all the mental calculations going on in my brain as I stare at the beer aisle. There's prior experiences with beers I've had. There's artwork and logos on a bottle of something I've never heard of that suggests the beer inside is either artistic, whimsical, or traditional. There's the price: Too high or too low, and I'm less inclined to buy. There's breweries I know and like, and breweries I don't know but heard good things about. There are beers that bring back warm fuzzy drunken memories. There are beers that bring back bad, painful drunken memories. There are reviews from respected beer writers to consider. There's the suggestion from a friend who swears I should try Blue Moon. There's the style I'm in the mood for, the particular season of the year, special releases, past special releases that may have sat on the shelf too long, whether the beer is refrigerated or not, where the beers are placed on the shelf, what my wife or friends might want to have, among a zillion other things.

All this takes place in about five or ten seconds between before I grab something and put it in my shopping cart. In a bar or restaurant, there's more time and consideration involved, but it's still a pretty reflexive decision. Lots of smart, hard working retail sales and marketing experts work on this multi-billion dollar question, and while they have a lot of insights, they certainly screw up from time to time, and there's still plenty they don't know. But the proliferation of craft breweries provides a highly diverse real world laboratory to test out plenty of marketing ideas. And clearly craft breweries like Stone Brewing, Dogfish Head, and Boston Beer Company have shown considerable marketing savvy. Others have resorted to desperate attempts involving foul sounding beer packaged in dead squirrels. And then there's the unique, distinctive, and extremely curious marketing approach shown by the Palo Alto Brewing Company.

As much as I enjoy the porter style, I don't think I'll be ordering a Barely Legal Coconut Porter with my wife or young daughter. Most men trying to score on a date will recognize that ordering a Hoppy Ending Pale Ale with it's massage parlor artwork lacks the required sophsticated subtlety for the evening's desired conquest, and will likely result in an opposite outcome. It's a pretty safe bet few women will buy beer associating them with pornography and prostitution. Since women compose a large and growing number of beer drinkers, this is a problem in terms of naked capitalism, not political correctness. But perhaps this marketing approach resonates so strongly with beer drinkers having certain attitudes and issues with women that it overcomes these complications.

Maybe someday, I will figure out the vexing mystery of how to make people buy beer, and if that ever happens, feel free to ask me for the answer. I might even take your call while reclining on my yacht.

A Safe Haven from the Liquid Giants of Half Moon Bay

2011-03-27T15:30:00.000-07:00

Half Moon Bay on the California coastline 20 miles south of San Francisco is a unique combination of a tourist town, farming village, and fishing port. North of the city, just off the Pacific Coast Highway next to a medium sized boat harbor, lies Half Moon Bay Brewing. I've been always meaning to got to this out of the way destination and so on an overcast Saturday, with few weekend visitors around, finally got the chance to check the place out.

As you might expect for a brew pub on the Pacific Coast, the menu was dominated by fresh seafood dishes. So it wasn't too surprising to find the beer brewed so it paired well with the local catches. For example, the Pillar Point Pale Ale had light nutty maltiness to go with its restrained leafy and herbal bitter hop finish. The Princeton-by-the-Sea IPA was your typical West Coast IPA, with just a whisper of malt to hold back the floral and grassy hop onslaught, except that hop character was decidedly less intense than one usually finds in California. Taking notes on the various brews I tasted, the words "light" and "slightly" come up a lot. My favorite selections with the sweet, milk chocolaty Paddle Out Stout, and Moonglow Barleywine, a highly malt-forward barley wine with plenty of sweet toffee flavors with slight citrus under tone.

The brewpub itself sits in an area protected by a long rocky jetty, creating a calm, almost serene ocean side setting. But venture out along the rocky coastline of nearby Pillar Point, beyond the jetty, and the atmosphere abruptly changes. Here is where the Pacific Ocean is at its most ferocious.

High winds, sea currents, and an ocean floor that rises quickly from great depths as it approaches the coast combine to create huge waves just beyond Pillar Point. Once a year if all the conditions are right, a bunch of big wave surfers gather together on 24 hours notice for famed Mavericks Surfing Contest, to see who's the best at riding waves the size of a small office buildings. The winner is often recognized as the best big wave surfer in the world, and simply just riding a few of these waves earns adulation within the tight-knit surfing community. Every so often, someone trying to tame these waves dies.

You need a jet-ski to get close these liquid giants, and not having one, or willing to risk the turbulent surf even if I did, got as close as possible on land before retreating back to the safety behind the rocky jetty to the quiescence of the inner shoreline.

Beer of the Month: Highway 78 by Green Flash / Port Brewing / Stone Brewing

2011-03-25T05:48:00.000-07:00

For this personally hectic month of March which, you may have noticed, led to this blog being a bit neglected, I anoint a collaboration brew between Green Flash, Port Brewing, and Stone Brewing called Highway 78 as Beer of the Month. For those of you who don't know your way around San Diego, Highway 78 runs nearby all three breweries. I discovered this Scotch Ale during my travels to Hollywood earlier this month, a trip that seems like last year.

I found it rather ironic that three breweries who have made most of their reputations shovelling lots of hops into their brew kettles have come together to make a really smooth Scotch Ale with no hop character to speak of. I found the rich, savory, umami flavors dominating with some sweet molasses and smokey undertones rounding it out. There's nothing arresting or hitting you over the head, just a lot of easy drinking flavorful malt goodness. Since brewery collaborations tend to produce rather extreme beers which at time have gone a bit over the top for my taste, I was surprised to find this such a smooth, easy sipping relaxing brew from a collaboration one would least likely expect.

It's been a crazy month for work and family matters. Thank goodness for beers like Highway 78 that provide a respite from the chaos.

A Beer Runner in Hollywood

2011-03-13T18:50:00.000-07:00

The city of Hollywood rarely evokes thoughts of beer or running, so I didn't know what to expect when my business travels took me there last week. My job involves an extremely unsexy niche' electronic equipment which related to an equally unsexy trade show being held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, and with downtown LA hotel prices what they are, we ended up staying to Hollywood to save a few bucks. So the burning question I had, which no doubt most of you have been contemplating for years was "What's the beer running like in Hollywood?"

Things were not looking so good the first night's dinner at a California Pizza Kitchen in a garish mall on Hollywood Boulevard, as our waiter explained the tap list included "local beers" Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and Pyramid Hefeweizen. Considering those respective breweries in Chico and Berkeley California are 460 and 370 miles away, neither of those beers were particularly local. I was trying to think of a diplomatic way to explain this to the waiter without being too obnoxious, which for me is no small accomplishment. But can you think of a beer, any beer, associated with Los Angeles? Me neither. I shut up and ordered a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

That night, I wandered around Hollywood Boulevard, looking for interesting places to have a beer or two, only to find one dismal tap list after another. Finally, I stumbled upon the historic Snow White Cafe, which has been around since 1946 according to the sign outside. There's something pitch perfect amongst the dissonance of a hole-in-the-wall dive bar on Hollywood Boulevard decorated in a Snow White and the Seven Dwarf's motif. The jovial, sandy haired, 20-something barkeep wearing a white Playboy T-shirt with an undefinable European accent seemed to fit right in. If your idea of an exotic tap list is Coors Light, Budweiser, Sam Adams, Redhook, and Widmar Brothers, you've come to the right place, and you'll never forget this cheerfully funky place.

Running on the Hollywood Walk of Fame the next morning was a bit of a feat. The hard part is reading the names on all the stars as they whiz underneath your feet while running along without tripping on the uneven sidewalk, and doing a faceplant on say, Tallulah Bankhead's star. Hollywood Boulevard is actually a pretty ordinary street, and a lot of it runs through industrial sections of the city. Bob Hope's star is actually in front of a vacant lot in a rather barren neighborhood. Maybe it was a nicer place once upon a time, but you would think his people could've got him a star in a lot better location. At the end of the first mornings run, I stumbled upon Runyon Canyon Park. I didn't have much time to explore it, but figured I would come back the next morning.

It turned out to be a great find. Runyon Canyon Park is a narrow strip of 130 acres, with one end near downtown Hollywood and the other end way up the canyon at Mulholland Drive, so if you plan to run these trails, get ready for lots of steep ascents or descents. Do so, and you'll be rewarded with great views of both downtown Hollywood and Los Angeles, as well as great view of the "Hollywood" sign from the side, rather than from the bottom of the hill the way most people see it. Lots of people were out each morning walking their dogs, or getting their morning walk or run in. There's no better way to explore a new place than to run around in it, and finding places like this, which provides a unique, local community perspective.

With all due respect to the Snow White Cafe, I decided to consult The Beer Mapping Project, in hopes to find local Los Angeles beer somewhere, anywhere. As it turned out, just a couple blocks away from the Snow White Cafe was Lucky Devil's, basically a burger and barbecue place with about ten excellent taps. Finally! Some local beer to be found. The first LA brew I tried was 1903 Lager from Craftsman Brewing of Pasadena, CA, an interesting bready, slightly sweet and lightly hopped lager. Even better was the Hell Hound Brown Ale from Cosmic Ales in nearby Corona, CA. Brown ales can be a bit of a boring style, but this one had a great combination of bitter, sweet, nutty, and slightly aromatic flavors. If you go to Lucky Devil's, make sure you have room for dessert, as they specialize in Liege waffles, a thick bready Belgian waffle, which they drizzle with this yummy Chimay beer caramel sauce.

That week in Hollywood, I did not get to party with any movie stars. That included Charlie Sheen, who has demonstrated a rather remarkable endurance in his own right. Unfortunately, he seems to have trouble keeping out of fights with porn stars, and prefers cocktails and cocaine over beer, among his rather serious problems. One wonders, if Charlie would just kick back with a few beers with his escorts, and then go for a good run with them the next morning, wouldn't his life be a whole lot better?

The Session #49: Regularity is Extraordinary

2011-03-04T05:30:00.000-08:00

For this month's Session, Stan Hieronymus of Appellation Beer asks us to write about Regular Beers.

Regularity seems so ordinary and boring, but it's what we all crave. The mind can handle only so much intense stimulation before it effectively cries "uncle", while too much passive relaxation renders us paralyzingly numb. A healthy medium of regularity is why none of us make our home on a roller coaster or in a sensory deprivation tank. Indeed, regularity is quite underrated, especially for those who suffer from depression, anxiety, autism, substance addition, mental illness, brain injuries, and other afflictions where "being regular" is either fleeting or impossible. Finding an ordinary regularity is what we do to get through life.

And so about once a week when neither of us feel like making dinner, my wife and I head down to our neighborhood taqueria after we're both pretty tired and frazzled after a particularly long, stressful day at work. We each get a burrito and a pint of Deadicated Amber Ale from our hometown brewery Devil's Canyon. The roasty malt flavors, its strong earthy character, and its light grassy hop finish goes great with Mexican food. The simple, yet subtlety complex pleasures of a good beer and a burrito allows us to recharge and rebalance so we so can do it all over again tomorrow.

Beer has long been a regulator in civilization and for that, we are grateful.

Daily Mile Gadget Dilemma No More

2011-02-27T18:00:00.000-08:00

Runners like talking about running. After all, running is what we do, so it's only natural that we talk about it. And so after thirty years of talking to runners I've learned a couple things.

1) The best thing to do when meeting runners is asking questions that get them talking about their running. "How's your running going?" or "Got any races coming up?" are my go to running ice breaker questions.

2) Talking about my running when not specifically asked usually bores people to tears.

Let's face it, in the grand scheme of things, our workouts and our races are not that important. Of course, our family and friends will care about what's important to us, and if that happens to be running, of course they will be interested. But that doesn't mean they want a blow by blow account of yesterday's run. Runners are often deeply invested in their running, and for good reason, but let's face it, everyone including runners, has more important things going on in their lives than running. We have family, jobs, and other activities, and it's hard for anyone to muster up more than a polite enthusiasm about your next 10k. And our training involves a rather mind numbing sequence of times, distances, and other trivia. Do you really care how far I ran yesterday? Didn't think so.

And so for the last fews days I've thought about removing the DailyMile gadget off this blog which dutifully listed each days run with my comments, and today I did just that. It was hard to see the point of having it there. Keeping a daily running log is about carefully documenting each workout so that you can look back on it someday, and figure out what works, and what doesn't work, and tiny snippets of this are not something I think most people would find interesting. Of course, I could try to make it entertaining with witty comments about each run, but what can you really say about a run that's new and fresh that you've already done a bunch of times already. The result was some pretty innocuous commentary on this DailyMile gadget, such as "Felt pretty good, day off helped". Boy, doesn't that sound exciting!

The thing to remember is that running is not about individual workouts. It's really about the totality of weeks and months of hard work, slowly ascending to your goals over the long haul. Sure, you can have a big day and pop a really good workout, but just like distances races themselves, training is a lot about steady persistence. And so a training log book is bound to reflect that, with most days being rather routine.

And just because I can broadcast my daily running log book to the world doesn't mean I should. Running is a rather personal endeavor, and I often only discuss it with my close circle of family members, friends, teammates, training partners and coaches. I'd like to keep it that way.

SF Beer Week Photos and Videos at The Brew Lounge

2011-02-22T11:44:00.000-08:00

Bryan Kolesar has put up a whole slew of photos, videos and stories on The Brewlounge about his days here in the Bay Area during SF Beer Week, including the Beer Run. You can find it all here.

Nanobreweries are Big Stuff at the Breweries of Tomorrow Festival

2011-02-21T17:00:00.000-08:00

I should have expected my predicament. Plenty of people I spoke to in the days leading up to SF Beer Week cited the Breweries of Tomorrow NanoBrewery Festival as one event they didn't want to miss, which featured a number of small, new breweries in the process of commericializing their operations. This explained why my wife Linda and I were stuck way in the back of a stagnant line leading out the door of Social Kitchen and Brewery and all the way down the adjacent parking lot at 6 pm on a cool Sunday evening. We considered going somewhere else that evening, but decided to wait out the line in hopes we could get in. But with the line not appearing to budge one bit, it was not looking so good for our plans.

Linda and I did eventually make it inside after about an hour of patiently waiting. There is a certain irony in the fact that I wouldn't dream of standing in line for an hour for a pint of something like Pliny the Younger from one of my favorite breweries Russian River, and yet here I was, standing in line for an hour for beers from a bunch of brewers I basically knew nothing about. You could say this experience gave me a new perspective on waiting in long lines for hard to find beers, since as soon as we got inside, Linda and I pretty much left our frustrations outside and enjoyed this quirky, crowded, and unusual festival.

What struck us was how these new comers genuinely produced beers every bit innovative and well crafted as anything you can find in the Bay Area. Linda and I tasted about twelve beers between us and were impressed by many of them, not finding one clunker in the bunch. It was fun talking to folks in the crowd, asking what they liked, getting various impressions from different breweries that were complete wild cards to virtually everyone in attendence. I was also glad to bump into fellow beer bloggers John Heylin and Matt Knopf.

So congratulations to Brian Stechschulte, creater of the Bay Area Craft Beer Website and blog All Over Beer, who organized this unique event that succeeded beyond everyone's expectations. And congratulations to all the nanobrewers, who proved they can craft a beer every bit as good as the big boys. While they were all good, I'd like to cite four beers that Linda and I tried that really stuck out from the rest. (Sorry if I got anything wrong here, the crowd made it difficult to take notes and I was just trying to enjoy all the new beers, so my note taking that evening was not the greatest.)

Peppermint Porter from 510 Brewing
Peppermint what? Both Linda and I both thought we weren't going to like this beer, judging it only by the name. Surprise, surprise, it was our favorite of the night. The peppermint is rather up front, but blended well with the roasted malt flavors of the porter. Think of a peppermint patty and you start to get the idea. 510 Brewing's Travis Smith explained this was their idea as a winter seasonal beer, since peppermint is a flavor associated a lot with the winter. I don't know exactly why this beer worked, but give these guys credit for trying something original and pulling it off.

Luminesce Belgian Strong Ale from Beltane Brewing
A close second for favorite of the evening was this arresting Belgian Strong Ale from Beltane Brewing. I enjoyed its rich malty character, aromatic flavors, and banana-like fruity esters at the finish. Beltane also poured a Double Belgian Ale Linda really liked as well.

Porter from Petaluma Hills Brewing
I'm a porter fan, and really liked this porter from Petaluma Hill Brewing. I didn't take any notes, just enjoying sipping away on this one not wanting to be bothered by writing down any tasting notes. The head brewer at Petaluma Hills Brewing gives his name only as "JJ". Dyno-MITE! (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

English IPA from Orange and Black
I just loved the great hop aromas eminating from this well balanced and refined IPA brewed in the English style. If these guys keep brewing beers this good, they really ought to get themselves a website.

Can't wait for some of these brewers to give their beers actual names!

I look forward to all the brewers going pro, and might even wait in line over hour for their beers even then.

Beer of the Month: Retribution from High Water Brewing

2011-02-18T00:30:00.000-08:00

February's Beer of the Month is awarded to a new brewery in the Bay Area brewing scene, High Water Brewing, founded by acclaimed brewmaster Steve Altimari. Altimari was brewing highly regarded ales at Valley Brewing in Stockton, CA before his abrupt dismissal last year for curious reasons that remain elusive. I can only go by what I read of this particular break-up, but on a 1-10 scale of break-up animosity, where "1" means "they still remained really good friends" and "10" means "resulted in a murder-suicide", this one seems to rank about an "8". And so it seems natural Altimari would name one of his first beers Retribution, which Wiktionary defines as "punishment inflicted in the spirit of moral outrage or personal vengeance."

I sampled Retribution at a Meet the Brewer Night held at Gourmet Haus Staut, a San Francisco Beer Week event, where Steve Altimari was on hand to discuss his beers, and got a minute to chat with him. Understanding one can only take an approximate measure of a man upon meeting for the first time in a loud, packed bar, for only a minute, Steve's calm and solid stature, measured and easy going demeanor, and long salt and pepper hair tied back neatly in a long pony tail suggests someone more likely to name his brews along the lines "I'm OK, You're OK Ale".

Retribution is a fantastic Imperial IPA, composed of lots of strong herbal, grapefruity hop flavors balanced by lots of rich, slightly sweet and lightly caramelized malt that goes down really smooth for all of its intensity. Somehow, all those 95 international bitterness units embrace, rather than attack the palate and I found this beer, for all its strength and power, actually easy drinking. At 9.5% abv, it literally and figuratively knocked me out.

Retribution is such a good brew, I would have one with my ex-wife, except she still doesn't drink beer.

Discoveries from the 2nd Annual SF Beer Week Beer Run

2011-02-15T04:49:00.000-08:00

What if they had a beer run and lots of people came? Believe it or not, this was something I worried about when Bryan Kolesar and Brian Yaeger approached me about holding the 1st Annual SF Beer Week Beer Run last year, as I have this peculiar habit of analyzing ideas in terms of worst case scenarios. What if someone got hit by a car? What if holding a run like this was actually illegal? After a day of contemplation, I realized a bunch of people getting together for a run and drinking beer afterwards was probably not going to lead to a cataclysmic disaster, and so worked together with Brian and Bryan to get the run organized.

Plenty did go wrong. A blizzard hit Philadelphia that week, and Bryan Kolesar never got a plane out of his home town. We publicized the run only a few days before the event, so very few people were actually aware of it. Of the five people who showed up, pretty much all of them got lost at some point running through Golden Gate park, and one guy had to head back to retrieve his girlfriend who was nowhere to be seen. But I think it's fair to say that despite all that, everyone had a blast, and a beer run turned out not be not such a crazy idea after all.

So this year, we figured with better organization, more people would show up to the 2nd Annual Beer Run. What we hadn't counted on was a contingent from Team in Training showing up, members of the San Francisco Road Runners coming out, that the run would be the subject of a meet-up , or that one of the runners was already organizing beer runs in San Francisco on her own. About 60 of us took over Social Kitchen that morning, proving once again, the seemingly different activities of beer and running hold some sort of resonance.

Beer has long been recognized as a social lubricant. Running, which involves more hard work than drinking beer, not so much so. But since the time I started running as a socially awkward twelve year old, I certainly recognize and appreciate how the shared effort and experiences from a run brings people together and breaks down social barriers. Unlike other sports requiring memberships, access to special facilities, or expensive equipment, if you lace up your shoes and head outside, you're a runner. And on that late Sunday morning in San Francisco, 60 of us became less of a stranger to each other.

So for those who ran that morning who might be reading this, all I can say is I hope you've felt as fortunate to join the beer run as I did.

Genesis of a new beer style: The Sour Porter

2011-02-09T17:19:00.000-08:00

Inspired by craft brewers all over the world who are constantly pushing the brewing envelope to create new and innovative beers, my home brewing exploits resulted in the creation of a new beer style, the Sour Porter. While the traditional porter roasted malt flavor profile is apparent if you concentrate real hard, the initial sensation the brewing connoisseur will experience from this beer is an intense sourness in homage to the long Belgian tradition of sour ales. This innovative feat of home brewing was accomplished using traditional porter brewing ingredients fermented using traditional British Ale yeast, combined with a rare, mysterious yeast strain that can only be found lurking around somewhere in my apartment. Upon sampling this beer, there are those who will not share my out of the box thinking, and claim that it tastes like a home brewed porter gone terribly wrong due to some horrible yeast infection, but that will only prove they have highly unsophisticated palates.

Lord, what the hell happened to my last home brew? It was supposed to be a coffee porter made with Starbuck's Verona blend coffee, which I called Verona's Coffee Porter as a tribute to my eight year old daughter of the same name. It tastes like some porter that someone poured a bottle of vinegar into. I suppose screwing up a home brew named after my daughter shows what a fair, even handed parent I am, since I just recently made a rather funny tasting brown ale named after my son Brandon. After further reflection and analysis, I believe I know where the contamination is from and will correct for it, but for now, I'm stuck with a bunch of undrinkable stuff.

They say anything worth doing is worth doing badly. And like running, what you get out of home brewing is what you put into it, and my last couple of brewing efforts have been decidedly half-assed efforts. But the good thing about bad home brew is you can simply turn to beer made from a professional brewer who knows what he is doing, rather than choke down your own swill. And the struggles of home brewing is one way to appreciate the skills and talents of brewers who owe their livelihood to what comes out of their brew kettles.

Sorry Verona, next time I'll get it right.

The Session #48: Teletubbies, David Beckham, and Cask Ale

2011-02-04T06:00:00.000-08:00

For this month's Session, Simon Johnson of The Reluctant Scooper asks the simple question: Cask, Keg, Can, Bottle: Does dispense matter?.

What do Teletubbies, David Beckham, and Cask Ale have in common? Do I dare say they're three things in held in high acclaim from the United Kingdom which many Americans find quite underwhelming?

Of course, if our friends on the other side of the pond wanted to claim a reasonable microcosm of American society could be found in any episode of The Jerry Springer Show, our national pastime of baseball involves a bizarrely complex set of rules and the players mostly standing around for several minutes at a time only to be interrupted by a second or two of action, and that the only thing sillier than The Teletubbies was American religious conservative leader Jerry Falwell denouncing Teletubbie Tinky Winky as a immoral gay influence, I'd say they've made three excellent points.

Sure I'm being confrontational. But one path to cultural understanding is acknowledging things about our respective cultures the other doesn't understand. The Teletubbies earned lots of awards in the UK for children's television, but like most American parents, I got down on my knees and praised the Lord when my kids outgrew them. David Beckham has hardly set our second-rate soccer league on fire, and owes his notoriety in the United State more to Posh Spice than anything he's done on the soccer field. And when I'm out with family and friends who are genuinely interested in craft beer and cask ale is available, I'm greeted by confused looks and indifference whenever I explain its significance. I've found there's far more interest in the taste and origins of craft beer, than the method of how the beer is stored or dispensed. Usually someone will order a pint from the cask, and when I ask them how they like it, rather than raving about the unique qualities cask conditioning imparts to the beer, the most likely response is a polite, but unenthusiastic "it's nice" to cask conditioned ale.

Yes, all things being equal, I will order something on cask rather than from a keg. But what style beers are available as well as any past experiences I've had with them, combined with what I'm in the mood for, factor far more into my decision on what beer to order than what happens to be on cask, or from a can or bottle for that matter. Perhaps my feelings about cask ale can be summed up from the time I found myself in a brewpub where the beers, in my opinion, were quite ordinary, but the porter happened to be on cask, so I ordered it. The feathery lightness injected into this mediocre porter by the cask conditioning magically and wondrously transformed it into something slightly better than mediocre.

The fact that the Real Cask Ale movement has never really gathered much traction in the United States suggests to me a certain craft beer cultural disconnect between the United Kingdom and the United States echoed in this month's session question. Sure, there are studies indicating sensory differences between beer dispensed by forced carbonation, cask conditioning, bottles, cans and what not, but it seems most Americans are far more focused on the content and origin of the beer, than how it actually gets into the glass. Taking a stab at where this cultural disconnect lies, the American craft brewing community seems more focused on the brewing methods, ingredients, and the American entrepreneurial spirit of the craft brewing industry where home brewers turn their passions into a business. Our friends in the United Kingdom seem to concentrate more on the context of how the beer is consumed and enjoyed, with more focus on pubs and tradition, with this month's Session topic a natural extension of this emphasis.

Which means I'm really not the right person to be answering this month's Session question. I'm afraid a more lucid answer would come from Tinky Winky.

Avoiding Treadmills

2011-02-02T16:30:00.000-08:00

I just find treadmills mind numbing. You just keep moving your arms and legs back and forth on them with your surroundings remaining static, your feet landing on an artificially smooth surface, with no wind in your face or anything else to really connect you to the outside world. I understand for many runners where constant heavy winter snow makes it impossible to get any reasonable workout in, they are a necessary evil. But just because treadmills are sometimes necessary does not make them any less evil.

My travels took me Logan, UT this week for business, and I could have run on the treadmills at my hotel. Especially since the temperatures were in the single digit degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty cold for people who live around here, and really cold for people like me who live in Northern California. But running is about breaking down bariers and that includes barriers put up by the weather. Training for races is more than simply getting into some level of cardiovascular fitness. It's about training the mind, testing yourself either by running over different and difficult terrain, slogging through inhospitable weather, and varying the running distances and paces so that on race day, your prepared for anything the race throws at you. A treadmill just doesn't provide the same spontaneous unpredictable experience of running outside.

And with this in mind, I stepped out of the hotel to start each day. There was a certain peace in those cold, quiet mornings gliding down the empty streets of Logan as the sun, hidden behind the snow covered Wasatch Mountains, slowly brightened the dark morning sky. After a while, the harsh cold provided more than morning stimulation, creating burning sensation and eventually numbness to my hands and face. But I prefer pain and numbness in the hands and feet from the cold outside to numbness in the brain from a painfully monotonous session on a treadmill indoors.

Besides, braving the cold morning makes those surprsingly addictive cinnamon rolls they have at the Holiday Inn Express breakfast bar even sweeter.

Running can't be bottled. This home brew shouldn't be.

2011-01-29T06:15:00.000-08:00

One of my biggest mistakes was making a really good home brew. Well, actually my mistake was making a pretty good home brew, and then sharing it with a few other people. Now I have way too high expectations to meet as for the all subsequent brews I make. Even worse, there's no real way I could ever reproduce that home brew ever again since brewing involved about five "oh shit" moments during a rather chaotic afternoon in the kitchen. The beer was from a recipe from Randy Mosher's book Radical Brewing called Black Ship Pirate's Stout, and for Randy Mosher's sake, it's probably good he didn't actually witness me brewing his beer. But somehow, all the flavors came together wonderfully and upon my first taste, I had my first "Damn, did I just brew this?" moment in home brewing. And since a few friends really enjoyed it, there were plenty of requests for my next home brew.

My next home brew I decided to call Brandon's Maple Brown Ale, a tribute to my son and his love for pancakes with maple syrup. And indeed, this home brew involved the requisite five "oh shit" moments and was yet another chaotic day in the kitchen. I used way too little water for the grain mash, creating a brown, jiggly, gelatinous gunk and zero malt extraction. So I poured pot after pot of water at 180 degrees over it to release the malt, sparging the beejeesus out of this mess in order to get something the yeast could feast on. Something weird happened when I poured the maple syrup into the secondary fermenter, the fermentation never really got going, and I had to shake the carboy a week later to jump start the fermentation again. The good news is that I will never be able to reproduce it, since my first reaction upon tasting it was "Damn, did I just brew this crap?". The beer has grown on me a little since, and I now call it an acquired taste, which is what brewers say about their beers when multiple consumption of the beer is required to build up a tolerance to it.

Perhaps in a brutally logically way, this is a fitting tribute to my son Brandon, since he has autism, and something didn't go quite right in his brewing process. But he's suffered enough, and brewing an odd-tasting beer in his name to add insult to his injury was certainly not my intention. I am dutifully distributing bottles of Brandon's Maple Brown Ale to all my friends who asked for it, with a gentle warning of what is in for them if they try it, and that they won't be hurting my feelings if they pour it down the drain. But there will be other home brews which will be better, and one of the best things about home brewing is that you can share your brewing success with others quite directly.

On the other hand, running success can be difficult to share with others, and certainly cannot be bottled. There's no way to distill my best races and runs and give them to others. But since these moments involved gastro-intestinal distress, burning sensations in both the lungs and legs, and I smelled rather awful afterwords, it's doubtful these bottled running moments would be particularly popular or welcome. There's a reason more people like drinking beer than running.

Beer of the Month: Full Boar Scotch Ale from Devil's Canyon Brewing

2011-01-18T06:30:00.000-08:00

I thought about featuring a winter seasonal for this January's Beer of the Month, but plenty of craft breweries have pulled their winter seasonals from the shelves, replacing them with their spring seasonals. It's bad enough when I go to K-Mart in the middle of October looking for Halloween costumes for my kids and they already already have the Christmas trees and decorations up, but here in the middle of winter, it's getting awfully hard to find a winter seasonal. Craft breweries alway claiming to be so much better than big corporate breweries often by the sole virtue of being smaller local companies, and if they stopped imitating the annoying habit big corporations have of releasing seasonal products months before the actual season they are intended for, this superiority they claim over big corporation would gain additional credibility.

Thankfully, Devil's Canyon Brewing Full Boar Scotch Ale, is available all year around, even if it seems ideal for winter. So ideal in fact, that I got myself a growler of it for the holidays, sipping out of port glass on cold winter nights. OK, it rarely gets below 40 degrees Fahrenheit at night in the Bay Area, but having gotten soft living here for ten years after moving here from the midwest, at least 40 degrees feels cold. It's a damp cold.

I quite enjoy all the flavors from the dark malts which combine with buttery, toffee-like notes with light molasses, and savory umami flavors. Try as I might, I couldn't detect any hops, even though I figure there's some in there. It's complex, but not heavy, making it very versatile beer that's both very drinkable and great sipping beer.

Devil's Canyon Full Boar Scotch Ale can be found in multiple locations up and down the San Francisco peninsula, or you can pick up a growler from the brewery in my hometown of Belmont. Enjoy it this month after a day shopping for Easter decorations.

The Brewing Network's Winter Brews Festival

2011-01-16T15:09:00.000-08:00

The Brewing Network is holding it's 2nd Annual Winter Brews Festival on January 29th in Berkeley from noon to 4 pm in Berkeley at The Martin Luther King Center in Berkeley. I went to the 1st Winter Brews Festival last year, and for a first time event, I thought they did a great job. So if you want to tune up your beer festival skills before SF Beer Week, or would like to try out some great beers from local breweries, check it out. You can find out more at www.thebrewingnetwork.com/ontap.

The 2nd Annual SF Beer Week Beer Run is on!

2011-01-14T20:43:00.000-08:00

I could wax philosophically about the egalitarian nature of both the sport of running and the beverage of beer. Or elucidate how a beer run fits into the California cultural ethic of work hard, play hard. But if I did, I'd probably start putting you all to sleep. So instead, I'll simply invite you to the 2nd Annual SF Beer Week Beer Run this February 13th at 11 am in front of Social Kitchen and Brewery that I'm organizing with fellow beer runners Brian Yaeger and Bryan Kolesar, as part of SF Beer Week. I'm also grateful Rich Higgins of Social Kitchen and Brewery agreed to participate, but his arm probably didn't need to be twisted very hard to support an event that would involve several thirsty people stopping on his doorstep before before noon. But he did agree to take a buck off our beers. You can find more details here.

Hope to see you there, and to help us figure out how many people will show up, please leave a comment to this post if you plan to be there.

My Tongue Survived an IPA Tasting

2011-01-11T20:15:00.000-08:00

One thing I've learned from running is that the human body is capable of remarkable adaptation from repeated stress. While an IPA tasting of this hop heavy beer style normally results in my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth and my lips left paralyzed in a permanent pucker, it looks like all those California hop monsters I've withstood over the years have conditioned my taste buds so that I can actually taste the subtle flavor components of beers that once upon a time tasted like chewing on an old bicycle tire.

The best beer bar in the South Bay is ironically called Wine Affairs, and they put on beer tasting events once a month. This month, it was an IPA tasting event consisting of no fewer than ten different examples of the IPA style, and with my wife Linda being a closet hop head, it seemed like I could talk her into going with me and putting off doing the laundry another day. Thankfully, she took me up on it.

My usual "brilliant" comments on an IPA typically consist of "this tastes pretty bitter" or "it's rather hoppy" but once you begin to taste them in series, even I could start tasting the differences. We started out with Meantime IPA ("fruity and citrus like, biscuity malt") progressing to Deschutes Hop Henge ("sweet, piney and grapefruity"), Ballast Point Sculpin ("light body, strong floral bitterness"), and then Duvel Triple Hop ("aromatic, coriander flavors with grassy and herbal hops") before my taste buds gave out after about the sixth beer, and all I could say "Yeah, that's bitter all right". Linda, on the other hand, had no problem getting through the whole flight.

Maybe I should ramp up my training by sucking on hop pellets to keep up with her.