Strike Brewing Officially Opens its Tap Room

So Strike Brewing opens its tap last Saturday.  I was running a race the next day so went easy on the beer. Nice bumping into a couple friends of mine on the Wolfpack Running Club.  The tap room pours a few beers you can't get anywhere else like a robust Oktoberfest and a Porter, both of which I enjoyed.   A lot of people showed up which was encouraging.  Not a lot to say, just some good beers and good times to spend a couple afternoon hours.  I'll leave you with a few pictures.

The Session #92: Is Passion Finding Joy in the Mundane?

For the this month's Session, Jeremy Short at Pintwell asks us to write about how homebrewing impacts our relationship with beer.  I started homebrewing five years ago, making 15-20 batches over that time.   A couple of those brews were awful, most were OK, and maybe three times the malt, hops and yeast combined to somehow create something sublime, causing me to exclaim "Damn, did I just brew this?". As you might expect, homebrewing removed much of the mystery from creating beer.  From homebrewing, I discovered that beer was not created by magic, but by careful treatment of malt, hops, yeast and creating the right conditions to allow them to transform into beer.

I also learned that brewing beer is a royal pain in the ass.  There's always some object, large or small that needs to be sanitized.  I spend long periods blankly staring at a pot of boiling wort and once the beer is brewed and the yeast pitched, I'm left with a messy kitchen to clean up.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoy homebrewing. Formulating the recipes, enjoying the final product, and sharing it with others is all fun, and that's what most people enjoy about homebrewing.  But the not-so-fun parts, like all the cleaning and time consuming tediousness of brewing are things I can barely tolerate.   For those reasons, even if I had more time, I wouldn't homebrew that more often.  I'm hardly what you'd call a passionate homebrewer.

Another hobby of mine is running.  Most people say I'm a passionate runner, and they're probably right. Running is often portrayed as basically moving your arms and legs around, feeling great and crossing the finish line with your arms raised in victory.  It really isn't that way at all.  Running involves a lot of long runs, often done in the early morning in solitary anonymity.  It's critical to focus on running form to maintain efficiency and prevent injuries.  One must also venture into lung searing oxygen debt two or three times are week in order to really improve.  Sore feet and tired legs are daily parts of the deal, as well as the occasional unplanned discharged of various bodily fluids.  At lot of people find running tedious, boring and highly uncomfortable.  I love nearly every minute of it.  (OK, maybe not the bodily fluid discharge part.)  I'd have to agree this enjoyment of all things running is not really logical and my brain is uniquely wired such that I can't sit still for five seconds.  Still, there's a lot of people out there just like me.  I get together with like minded individuals Saturday mornings at 7:00 am to run a bunch of laps around a track about as fast as we can go.  It's our idea of a good time. Most people would consider this some type of torture.

Sure, a few brief times a year, there's that thrill at the end of race crossing the finish line.   But this is a small part of running, even if it is the end result of all the hard work.   Of course, sometimes after all that work I have a bad race that produces disappointment rather than elation.   It's nice that running keeps the weight off and is good for my health, but this is just a nice byproduct.  I enjoy the mental discipline of maintaining and concentrating on good form for over an hour at a time.  It's almost meditative and it's hard to explain to those who incredulously ask, "You mean you actually like running?".  As for why I set impossibly high standards for myself and willingly engage in self-abuse, I'd like to keep that between me and my therapist.

This makes me wonder if passionate homebrewers actually enjoy the act of brewing, which when you think about it, is actually about as sexy as cleaning a toilet.  Do passionate homebrewers find staring at the turbulent wort meditative?  Does perpetual cleaning of the equipment create a spiritual feeling of ritual purification for the yeasts to do their thing?  Is the journey of exploring an endless combinations of hops, malt and yeast before finding the exact combination to create the perfect beer the road to homebrewing nirvana?  Or do homebrewing enthusiasts hate all the tedium and cleaning just like me but the thrill of beer creation overrides this in their brains?

Which leads me to wonder:  Does passion for any hobby flow from its pleasures, or does it come from the rare enjoyment of it's most mundane aspects?  You tell me.

Dan Gordon talks about 25 years at Gordon Biersch in Edible Silicon Valley

One of the many things I did this summer was interview Dan Gordon for an article published in the current issue of Edible Silicon Valley.   I'm especially appreciative of Dan Gordon's time in discussing his 25 years at Gordon Biersch and personally showing me around his brewery.   The result is what I think is one of the best things I've written in my brief part time writing career.  You can read the article online here.

Weekend at Yosemite...with pictures

Half Dome Through the Mist from Glacier Point

Last weekend was the family trip with some friends to Yosemite National Park.  I did no running, but drank some fine Mammoth Brewing beers.  Saturday, the whole family made it all the way up the John Muir Trail to Nevada Falls.  If recovering from a long hike with a Mammoth Brewing Double Nut Brown Porter isn't bliss, I don't know what is.

Not much else to say, but I took some nice pictures, so hope you'll enjoy them!

Nevada Falls 

Liberty Cap...Nevada Falls can be seen just off to its right if you look close

The drought left only a trickle of water over Nevada Falls

The family on the Nevada Falls bridge

Mammoth Double Nut Brown Porter is mighty
tasty after a hike.

Programming Note: Those "X" weeks to the Big Sur Marathon are going to change

Faithful readers of this blog (Hi Mom!) have certainly noticed the last four week I posted "X weeks to the Big Sur Half-Marathon.  It was an experiment of sorts to tell a tale of my training and experience leading up to the Big Sur Half-Marathon while doing my best to avoid turning into an self-indulgent running "bus schedule".

Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, the series began coming across as a self-indulgent running "bus schedule".  Of course, one could argue self-indulgent posts are what blogs are all about.   But I wasn't that happy how they turned out and the weekly series was taking time away from posts I was more interested in writing.  So after analyzing the data from the initial experiments, I've decided to abandon the format, but not the ideas behind what it the format in the first place.  I'll still be writing about the build up to the Big Sur Half-Marathon but will tell the story in a different way, which I think you'll find more interesting to read.   Hope you stick around for that.

Eight weeks to the Big Sur Half-Marathon



The Mine Hill Trail at Almaden Quicksilver Park

"In general, any form of exercise, if pursued continuously, will help to train us in perseverance. Long-distance running is particularly good training in perseverance."
Mao Tse-Tung


Maybe a communist dictator is maybe not the ideal person to endorse the positive attributes of running, but then a guy who led a country of nearly a billion people and coerced his citizens to literally sing their praises to him is someone we ought to pay attention to.  Running does indeed train the mind in matters of perseverance.  I've found running helps me handle the set-backs life throws at me, as well as instilling a "stick to it-ness" to grind through difficult problems and situations.

On to week four.....Monday was a recovery day, due to a work activity that wasn't going to allow me to put in any miles that morning.  I still did some foam roller and course exercises before heading out for work.  Tuesday was a six mile run to the Vasona Dam and back.

Wednesday was supposed to be a 7 mile tempo run.  I say supposed to be, because by 5 3/4 miles, I was completely fried.  The plan was to go out in 6:20-6:25 pace for the first couple miles, and I got carried away that morning and at one point, was screaming down the Los Gatos Creek trail in well under 6:00 per mile pace, if my Garmin watch is to be believed.  I settled down a bit to 6:15-6:20 pace, but the damage was done and shortly before six miles, I had nothing left to continue at even 6:45 per mile pace.

Running too fast is better than running too slow, but not that much better.  Pace sense is an important skill for running, and it takes a certain mental discipline to hold back and find the right pace automatically.  I set out to do a run of seven miles at 6:25 pace, and didn't do that.  The first slight clunker of a workout so far on the road to Big Sur.  There will likely be a few others.

Thursday was an eight mile run to Vasona Park and back.  This was a slight mist in the air, that barely registered on meteorological instruments,  the first fall rain of what hopefully will be a torrent. We need rain here. I felt surprisingly good despite yesterday's slight set-up.  Ditto for Friday's six miler, minus the rain.

I was pretty focused for Saturday's four mile tempo run on the Los Gatos High School track with my training group to get my pacing mojo back.  The plan was to go out in 6:00-6:04 pace.  Anything faster than 6:00 per mile pace was too fast.  I clicked through the four miles with the group in 6:01-6:02-6:04-5:58. Perfect!

Afterwards, we all did all warm down and Maria Trujillo, who's part of the group, and I started chatting away since we hadn't seen each other in a couple months, catching up on things.  Maria was a world class distance runner in the 80's and 90's, finishing third in the 1990 Boston Marathon in 2:28. When I was in graduate school at The Ohio State University, I watched her win the Columbus Marathon. I couldn't have possibly imagined on that day that twenty years later and 2,000 miles away, we'd be talking about our autistic kids.

Maria and I often compare notes on our kids autistic behaviors.  Lot's of my other friends are understanding about the challenges about raising an autistic kid, but Maria and I deal with it on a regular basis.  Sometimes just talking about the  unique difficulties and small successes of raising our kids on our runs helps us get through it.

Sunday was a sluggish and challenging twelve miles on the trails of Almaden Quicksilver Park.  The legs held up, but I felt pretty trained the whole time.  Still, this run was a good exercise in developing the persistence needed on race day.

Week 4
Miles completed:  49
Weight:  175 lbs.
Currently preferred carbohydrate replacement drink: Alaskan Brewing Pumpkin Porter 

Beer of the Month: Hop Cuvee from Bison Brewing

For an article on organic beer in the upcoming issue of Adventure Sports Journal, I did a fair amount of "research" by sampling a bunch of organic brews. One that clearly stood out was bison Bison Brewing's Hop Cuvee.

It's a beer that couldn't possibility exist a couple years, at least in organic form.  It's brewed with organic Citra and Simcoe hops which have only been certified organic in the last couple years. Centennial hops and a couple other hop varieties are also added into the mix.  The light malt and dry character allow the hops to shine in all their grapefruity and piney character.  If you ask me, Hop Cuvee stands up with the best of the West Coast IPAs.

There was a time only a few years ago that organic beers were rather limited in scope, often found only in styles such as ambers or stouts.  This was largely due to the fact that organic hops were hard to come by, and often had to be imported from New Zealand or England.  The development of a nascent organic hop industry in the Pacific Northwest has changed that. Bison Brewing owner Daniel Del Grange has been a part of that change, organizing organic brewers all over the United States over the past decade to show hop growers the full demand for organic hops. Hop growers have responded, increasing their organic acreage and certifying new popular hop varieties such as Citra, Cascade and Simcoe.  The result is that organic brewers can can create a much broader spectrum of flavors than ever before.

That's a good thing because drinking organic takes a lot of chemicals out of our ecosystem that would be otherwise used to produce non-organic beer.  According to Bison's website, each individual who drinks a six-pack of organic beer a week forces the conversation of 1,700 square feet to organic barley agriculture.   From this figure, I calculate that if only 1% of California’s 38 million residents substituted an organic beer for a non-organic beer twice a month, it would force the conversion of 1,140 acres of land to organic agriculture.

Using data from the USDA on the fertilizers and pesticides used in non-organic barley farming, I estimate this small change in California beer consumption would remove 41 tons of Nitrate, 17 tons of Phosphate, 14 tons of Potash, and 12 tons of Sulfur fertilizer from our country’s eco-system, while eliminating over 1.6 tons of pesticides.  

So take this as a gentle nudge from your truly to encourage you drink a little more organically.  Not only will you be removing chemicals out of ecosystem, there's plenty of good organic brews out there.  You'll find few better brews, organic or non-organic, than Bison Brewing's Hop Cuvee.