Keeping a running journal again at DailyMile

Back in the day, I religiously kept a running journal. Actually, the information wasn't all that detailed. If I run a track work-out, I would just list the mileage and might note "track work-out" but wouldn't include the length of the track intervals or the times. It's not so much the information one puts into a running journal, but the thought and concentration involved in putting the day's run onto paper that makes a running journal valuable. Well OK, it doesn't take a lot of thought or concentration to write "7" on a piece of paper after running seven miles, but you get the idea. The problem was, every couple of years, I'd lose my notebook, and would have to start the whole process over again.

Sometime in the mid-90's, I ended my daily devotional of running journal entries entirely. A lot of this was simply because I wasn't running much then, and was well on my way to gaining about 50-60 lbs over the next fives years. There was a time I'd blame it all on marrying the wrong woman, who wasn't a big fan of me running, but I think it's fair to say that my first wife probably gave me a well needed break from running seriousness, just not in the right way.

So as to slowly reclaim back the old running life once lived, it's time to start keeping a running journal again. And instead of an old fashioned notebook, I've recently joined DailyMile to record each day of running. It's got a few new fangled features they didn't have back in the day. The most notable is the social networking aspect of the website, where you can have training "friends", and even send your friends motivation, in the form of icons shaped like a blue ribbon or a green thumbs up sign. If you want to send me motivation, well that's nice, but after thirty years with plenty of runs and races under my belt that have gone horribly wrong, countless running injuries of all type and severity, and a few unfortunate incidents involving either end of the digestive system, a green thumbs up icon from out of the blue is not going to make much difference in whether or not I keep at it.

The really neat feature of Daily Mile is their running route mapping feature, leaving no wild guesses as to how far each run is, or how high certain hills are. I've had some fun looking at the online map of my neighborhood, and think, "Hey, what if I ran this course?", then map it out and immediately get a good idea of what I'm getting myself into, rather than finding out the hard way.

For my other hobby, homebrewing, I haven't found the equivalent of Daily Mile, and wouldn't join, even if it existed. Something about quantifying a hobby changes it. By keeping track of miles, times, and workouts, running becomes, at a certain level, a chore, but it's doing those chores that pay off on race day, so I gladly do them. On the other hand, I just simply like brewing beer and sharing those results with friends, end of story. I have great friends who lie to me, always telling me the beer tastes great, whether or not it actually does. And perhaps because the stopwatch is more brutally honest than my friends, I have no real desire to monitor every last beta acid or religiously keep track of the gravity of the beer over the entire process, which would take a lot of fun out of home brewing for me. Maybe some day I'll enter my home brews into competitions and start keeping more detailed notes on my home brews, but right now, developing a repeatable malt extraction process or agonizing over how the judges are going to perceive my homebrews are stresses I'd rather not deal with right now.

So I keep a running journal, and will remain blissfully unaware of metrics needed to improve my homebrews. And unlike my old running journal written in a notebook for my eyes only, my daily workout are now on this blog via some Daily Mile gadget, for the whole world to see. My training is now a wide open book. Is this really progress?

Beer of the Month: Sleigh'r!!! By Ninkasi Brewing!!!

I once bought a Slayer album over twenty years ago back when I was in college. All I could remember about it was a bunch of really fast guitars nearly drowning out some guy yelling about a of bunch of people dying in particularly grisly detail. Metal bands have created some pretty compelling art about universal themes of fear, anger, frustration, and alienation, but I just found all that noise about countless gruesome deaths to be of all things, incredibly boring. I returned the record to the store in exchange for something else.

I certainly understand this personal anecdotal snippet from many years ago is no way to judge a band that's been together for nearly 30 years, but I still consider Slayer to be an interesting cultural curiosity I just don't get. But any band that's been together that long, has achieved status as one of the Big Four of Thrash Metal, and has millions of fans, including critical acclaimed classical violinist Rachel Burton Pine, must be doing a lot of things right. Like being the unlikely inspiration for an excellent Dark Double Alt beer released for the holidays by Ninkasi Brewing.

The beer itself pours a very dark brown, nearly black. As one might expect from its appearance, the first thing that hits you on the tongue is a heavily roasted, slightly smokey malt goodness which is surprisingly smooth and drinkable, despite all that heavy roasting and strong flavors. Then the banana-like esters kick in, solidly asserting themselves just before the a light clove-like aromatic spicy finish. It makes for an easy drinking sipping beer, or a beer that would pair quite well with a lot of strong wintery holiday foods like roasted beef, pork or smoked turkey.

Speaking of the holidays, not only has Slayer inspired a holiday beer, it's also inspired an entire Christmas light show someone created for their Southern California neighborhood my beer blogging buddy Peter Estaniel recently brought to my attention. Make sure you don't miss the flashing Christmas presents next to the electric flowing river of blood.

Perhaps the message here is that holiday good will can come from unlikely places. Maybe we'd have a lot fewer rivers of blood in this world if we did more to accept, seek out and welcome those who might seem strange and out of place, understanding it's these differences which make our world a great place to live. OK, it's a bit of sappy message, but I thought it would seem a lot less sappy cloaked in beer and thrash metal, so just work with me here.

Have a very Sleigh'r Holiday!

Open It!: Celebrating a little more room in the fridge with Stone Brewing's Old Guardian

Mark Dredge of Pencil and Spoon has asked us to Open It! and just choose a bottle you’ve been saving for ages, open it and then tell others about it.

I have this small problem with stock piling lots of great beers to be saved for a special occasions. Special occasions happen a lot less often than I find great beers to celebrate it with. And with the finite amount of available space in my refrigerator dwindling down due to the ever increasing collection of beer, my wife Linda tends to remind me in her own special way that unless I want to pour spoiled milk on my breakfast cereal and eat lots of rotten fruits and vegetables, I better do something about reducing my beer collection. And since Linda appreciates good beer as much as I do, sharing a beer with her to celebrate this slight reduction in the beer inventory tends to go a long way in defusing this volatile situation.

And so for the inaugural Open It!, a celebration of drinking great beer for no other reason to enjoy it, we shared a bottle of Stone Brewing's 2010 vintage of their Old Guardian Barleywine. I found the 2009 version, opened shortly after it's release in January of that year, to have a lot of good flavors, but plenty of rough edges that left an unpleasant harshness. And so figured giving the 2010 version 10 months to soften up and mellow out would result in a much better drinking experience than the 2009 version. And yes, waiting those extra months did pay off.

Pouring the amber colored brew into our glasses created a medium-sized frothy foam, which dissipated in a couple minutes, suggesting a rather low malt content for the style. As you would expect from Stone, hops were in abundance both in the aroma and taste. As the initial pour suggested, there was very little caramel and toffee-like malt in this barleywine style to hold back all the piney and grapefruity hops. The 10-month aging worked to the advantage of this brew, as it had much smoother, almost ticklish feeling on the tongue instead of the mouth puckering astringency I recalled from last year's version. Also noticeable was a little alcohol heat. If the bottle didn't say "Barleywine" on it, I'd guess it was an Imperial IPA.

For the next version of Open It!, we'll celebrate reorganizing all my home brewing equipment scattered around our apartment.

The Session #46: Nothing's Shocking

For this month's Session, Mike Lynch of Burgers and Brews discovered on a recent beer trip that "despite all the amazing stops I planned, one of the best experiences was completely accidental". From this experience, he asks us to write about unexpected discoveries in craft beer .

For the biggest jaw dropping, how the &%$# did that get there craft beer experience, I would have to go with the day I dropped into a 7-Eleven in Carlsbad, located just off of Interstate 5 while travelling on business just to get a Diet Coke. To my amazement, to the left of the Diet Cokes were bottles of Alesmith's IPA and Pale Ale. OK, so I wasn't all that far away from Alesmith's brewery in San Diego, but would anyone really expect to walk into the typical roadside 7-Eleven in one of those tired California strip malls and find something from a small, niche' brewery like Alesmith staring in the face behind the glass doors inside the wall-sized beer cooler?

But since that shock nearly two years ago, I've discovered great craft beer in lots of completely unexpected places like dingy dive liquor stores, a zoo, or at an airport in of all places, Salt Lake City as the craft beer industry continues to grow and proliferate. As I thought about this month's Session, what I found really shocking was that craft beer is now in so many shocking places it's no longer shocking.

For further evidence of craft beer's creeping ubiquitousness, where do you think these pictures below were taken?



Would you believe at my friendly neighborhood Safeway in Belmont, CA, located on the San Francisco Peninsula? And while I'm fortunate to live in a prime area for craft beer, walk into a nearby grocery store, give the beer selection a careful look and ask yourself, did you expect it to look like this five years ago?

Beer Wars? Indeed.

My Only Goal was to Finish

There's been very few races where my only goal was to finish, but I found myself on the starting line with that objective last Thanksgiving morning. I'd like to say I was about to start a marathon, ultra-marathon, or run some obscenely difficult course, but in fact, it was a simple five mile cross-country race in Golden Gate Park. I was pretty sick the day before and while I'm striving to be more descriptive in my writing, you'd probably don't want to read a detailed description of what emerged from my throat and nose over two previous two days. While I had recovered somewhat, certainly not enough to feel optimistic take on the race, even if these holiday races tend to be pretty good natured events.

Why was I even running in the first place rather than stay home? I have this certain ethic, perhaps better described as a stubbornness, to finish something I've started, no matter what. So if I've entered a race and not at death's door, I'm obligated show up on the starting line and give it my best, no excuses. I don't recommend this attitude for everyone but like to think it has served me pretty well. As long as we ignore all those times I've turned a little sickness into a raging fever because I didn't want to take a rest day, or a ended up limping around for a week thinking I could just push through some "little, nagging injury". So flying in the face of most conventional reason, there I was, after a few tepid and lethargic brief warm-up jogs and sucking nonstop on a water bottle all morning to battle a still slightly sore throat, about to give the race a go.

Surprisingly at the start, the slow "just finish the damn race" pace was surprisingly effortless, and I was a bit bewildered at where the sudden energy had come from. I have to say that whenever there's a starting line, a finishing line, and a clock timing how long it takes to run between the two, it just turns on some sort of high energy switch inside of me. But maybe drinking five or six glasses of water, each with a packet of Emergen-Cee dissolved into them the day before, giving me a daily dose of vitamin C good for over 50 people is what gave me the necessary recuperative powers. Or perhaps I was energized by the postcard-picturesque course that twisted and turned through the green rolling hills and coastal forest Golden Gate Park landscape, with the ground perfectly soft from four days of light rain, meticulously marked by tiny bright yellow flags and burnt orange traffic cones so no one would miss every zig and zag only the course.

Whatever the source of unexpected strength, I slowly picked up the pace, and methodically reeled in runner after runner over the first couple miles. And while the urban forest location provided a pleasing background to the race, it also provided some handy underbrush cover required for a little pit stop at about 1 1/2 miles, that was quite necessary from all the extra pre-race hydration. That business taken care of, I just concentrated on keeping good form, maintaining pace, and looking at the back of the runner in front of me, gradually pulling up to them, before concentrating on passing the next person. After five miles of this, I finished with a time and place much higher than I thought I could have realistically hoped for.

One thing running has taught me is there that are no guarantees for success. You can have several excellent weeks or months of training, with a good focused attitude and strong game plan, and things can still blow up in your face on race day for reasons either completely unknown or outside your controll. Thankfully the opposite is also true. Everything can be off or sub-par going into race day, and you can still end up hanging up a performance you think you had no business reaching. Enjoy those days when you can. I know I will.

PS - Considering all the "opps" and "oh shit" moments while home brewing the day after this race, I can only hope to have the same kind of luck with that endeavor once the yeast finishes its thing.

Pilgrimage to a Craft Brewing Shrine at Sierra Nevada

Maybe there should be some sort of craft beer Mecca, a spiritual journey each individual in the craft beer community must take in their lifetime. And while there are plenty of breweries in Europe that could rightfully lay claim to be the Mecca of craft brewing, it's hard to think of a better Mecca for the US craft brewing revolution than Sierra Nevada's Brewery in Chico, California, which Ken Grossman founded 30 years ago.

I recently travelled to Chico, but it was foot fungus, rather than craft beer that brought me there. I was there on business, helping a customer as they were commercializing a laser based foot fungus treatment. Once that meeting was completed and with no further business to attend at the end of the day, I drove across town to check out the brewery, hoping to have a look before heading home. To my pleasant surprise upon my arrival, there was a brewery tour scheduled to start about ten minutes, and acting fast, I secured a spot on it.

Giddy with the excitement of a five year old on Christmas morning, I went to the very front of the line as we marched around the brewery, and enthusiastically raised my hand every time our guide asked audience participation questions like "Does anyone know what wort tastes like?". As brewery tours go, it's one of the better ones, as our guide was pretty knowledgeable, and well trained to show people around the place.

The most impressive fact I learned is that Sierra Nevada generates 85% of the energy to run their brewery either with solar cells, or natural gas based fuel cells which have a low carbon footprint. Imagine the impact if every factory in the United States, if not the world, made even half this commitment to more sustainable sources of energy that Sierra Nevada has. The brewery has all sorts of little flourishes with frescos and etched tiles on the walls depicting the history of brewing.

I do not claim to be much of a photographer, but gave my best for these pictures to give this shrine of craft beer the reverence it deserves.

Beer of the Month: Hops on Rye from Firehouse Brewery

Firehouse Brewery's Hops on Rye earns the title of Beer of the Month for November. This Rye IPA is one of those unique beers that defy simple description. It's got a hefty amount of malt, with caramel and rye flavors up front, and a little sweetness. The malt balances well with all the hops that give the beer a piney and slightly menthol-like finish. Not only is it a great beer, it's the first time Firehouse has ever bottled one of their beers. Since Firehouse has won medals at the Great American Beer Festival each of the last three years, you might say it's about time their beers got more exposure. You can find it at Bay Area BevMo! and Whole Foods locations, as well at K&L Liquors in Redwood City. Renowned bottle shops City Beer and Beer Revolution also should have it before too long.

Firehouse Brewmaster Steve Donohue graciously provided a couple bottles at a recent meeting of the Bay Area Beer Bloggers held at Firehouse, where Devon, John Heylin, Brian Stechschulte, Peter Estaniel, Jen Buck McDaniel, Rich, David Jensen, and myself attended. It was a fun, enthusiastic, and vibrant bunch and I immensely enjoyed being a part of it. It was also rather interesting matching the real life personalities with each individual writing style.

So what actually happens at a Bay Area Beer Bloggers meeting anyway? You'll be shocked to discover it basically involves a bunch of people chatting about beer and blogging while they sit around a table and drink beer. As a special bonus at the end of the evening, Steve Donohue took us into his brewery and showed us around the place he's brewed those award winning beers.

But the beer blogging meeting was not all just about fun and beer. It served as a launch pad of scietific inquiry as Peter Estaniel, John Heylin, Steve Donohue and I contemplated the effect of dissolving Xenon gas into beer rather than the traditional Carbon Dioxide. And beer blogging proved to be an unstoppable force for peace and brotherhood, as Bruce Stechschulte, a graduate of the University of Michigan, and I, a graduate of their hated rival Ohio State University, still had an amicable discussion over a couple of pints, despite the fact that I'm a pretty fanatical Buckeye fan. One can imagine from this example how much destructive carnage and bloodshed could have been averted if only George W. Bush and Suddam Hussien had been beer bloggers.