Three years and counting

Three years after watching that Good Eats episode of "Amber Waves of Grain", who knew that I would still be brewing beer...

In the first years after graduating from college, I found myself looking for and sampling the local beer of the towns I visited for work.  Whether it be in San Jose for an Apple Developer's conference or Taipei, Taiwan or Dusseldorf, Germany or Cambridge, UK, I would be sure to order only the local beer.  If it was a known big brewery, I would wave it away in favor of the local brew.  I don't know when it happened, but a change happened.  It wasn't overnight, but it happened nonetheless.

My drink of choice turned from beer to wine.  I found myself looking for the local vineyards and waving away the big name brand wineries in favor of trying something local.  Whether it be in Napa or Northern Italy or Portland, Oregon or Nashoba Valley, Massachusetts, I would prefer to try the local vintages.  During this period, I picked up the book "The Judgement of Paris", a great book on a wine tasting that occurred in Paris in the summer of 1976 that turned the wine world up on its ears.  I would highly recommend this book if you haven't read it.  Wikipedia has a nice synopsis on the tasting event itself.  I remember finishing up this book while flying from Seattle to San Francisco and being able to overlook Napa and Sonoma valleys and being able to pick out the portions of the valleys that were referenced in the book, highly cool.

Fast forward a couple of years and I find myself with an Amazon.com gift card, watching an episode of Good Eats, where Alton Brown brews beer.  Now I had seen this episode before, but the stars aligned on this fateful evening and I jump on Amazon and find the same equipment that Alton had used in the eposide.  I chip in a couple of extra Hamiltons and embark on a hobby that has returned me to those days just out of college, where I prefer to go for the craft beer over the likes of Ansheusser-Busch, Molson Coors and the like.

For the past three years, I have been building up quite the little home brewery.  Every batch of beer that I make consists of 5 gallon batches.  Each batch corresponds to 2 cases of 12oz beers.  Many homebrewers quickly switch from bottling their beer to kegging their beer.  While I have aquired a kegerator in these past couple of years, I find that I maintain one commercial craft 1/6bbl keg of craft beer and one drinkable 1/6bbl keg of Earl's latest IPA.  Unlike most homebrewers, I prefer to bottle my beer.  And not just bottle in the 22oz bombers or the resealable Grolsch bottles, I prefer to bottle my beer in the 12oz bottles.  This gives me a good 48 to 54 bottles of beer in a given 5 - 5.5 gallon batch of beer.  This format also gives me the opportunity to share my beer with my friends as I see fit.

These days, I find that at any given time I have roughly 1bbl (31gal) of beer in some state of preparedness, from actively fermenting to aging in a secondary fermenter to aging in the bottle or in a keg in the beer fridge.  Today, I was asked if I could bring some beer over to an Easter Dinner on Sunday.  What's up with that?  The question wasn't necessarily if I had beer, but how much was needed?  I have put together a nice little variety pack that should go well with the offering on Sunday.  Naturally, I could bring a variety case or two, but that would be overdoing it a tad :) (sorry, Lance, I just used an emoticon after the age of 40)  :(

Recently my lovely wife, Heather, asked me why I would brew beers for different occasions, but never brew a beer in her name?  I really didn't have an answer for this.  To be sure, I am the only one in my house that actually drinks beer (remember the 31 gallons of beer I have at all times?).  This got me to thinking about how I could honor such a woman who openly encourages my hobby althewhile ribbing me everytime I break out anything resembling the brewing equipiment.  There was almost no question that I would brew a beer that included Heather.  Given that we were talking about Heather, a Scotch Ale was the next obvious item.  The next item on the list was to consult my various reference books on beer to determine what makes up a Scotch Ale.  I found that a Scotch 80/ Ale is a malty sweet ale that does not have additional armoas to hinder the caramel malt flavors.  Yet, we are in America, not in Scotland and Heather is as much of an American mutt as I am.  This means that I had the American freedom to build on the classic Scotch 80/ Ale.  Today, three years after I my first batch of home brewed beer, I brewed Heather's Honey Scotch 80/ Ale.

We'll see where my beer takes me over the next couple of years.  Next month I will be submitting two, possibly three, entries into the Samuel Adams Longshot Homebrew competition.  In particular, I am submitting a ginger beer that I brewed last September that only got better as it aged.  This beer will have aged close to 1.5 months by the time they judge the beer.

At this point, if you have a beer style that you would like, I am willing to give that beer style a try.  The beer that I have on deck is a variation on a classic English Bitter, Poppi's Pale Ale.

What beer would you like to share with me over the summer?  Let me know, and I will see about adding it to the upcoming lineup.

Seventeen weeks to the slowest bike race I'll ever compete in...

This weekend is seventeen weeks from the slowest bike race I'll even compete in, or so I'm told. That race is the Mt Washington Auto Road Bicycle Hillclimb. This weekend also marked the opening weekend of the GearWorks Saturday morning intermediate rides. I figured that this will be a great opportunity to ride with others who were at my skill level. In addition to that I am looking for a regular group ride beyond my regular individual riding. Little did I know that these folks are leaps and bounds above me with respect to their riding ability.

Like any other ride, this ride started out looking for the first road that had the word 'hill' in it. It turns out New England roads tend to include that word when it goes up the side of a hill. Who knew? On each of these hill roads, I found myself being dropped like Third Period French at the start of each climb. Sure the first hill I hung in there half way up the hill before being dropped. I didn't fair so well on each of the following two hills.

It was at this point that my morale was dropping rapidly. I am thinking "what have I gotten myself into here?". And it is not because of this ride, I will certainly be back for more. The real question revolves around the 7.2 mile ride I have entered into that is a mere seventeen weeks away with an average grade of 11.5% rise. If I can't hang with these folks, how am I supposed to make it up Mt Washington?

Today, after my weekend chores were settled, I decided to man up and head back out on the bike for some redemption. The destination was naturally the hills of Harvard and roads like Snake Hill, Pinnacle, Prospect Hill, Vaughn Hill, West Bare Hill, PartridgeHill and Stow Rds. The goal was to beat myself up by going up the steepest roads in Harvard. The first two I struggled up each. As I went up each of the following hills I found myself going up them with more and more confidence even though my thighs were burning from two days of hill climbing.

By the time I reached home, my confidence in my eventual ability to tackle Mt Washington in August rose to being at least doable. What makes me think that I will be able to climb Mt Washington after these two days of distinctly different results? The first ride I was trying to stay with the group. The second ride I stayed within my ability and maintained a good cadence without blowing up at the beginning of the climb. I even found myself up shifting and riding out of the saddle to give my legs a bit of a break while equally maintaining my speed just as you are supposed to do. I had only read about doing this without actually accomplishing this feat until today. Again this only aided in boosting my confidence.

Seventeen weeks from this weekend I'll be in the slowest race I'll ever compete in. Until today, I had been working on what I had thought was three key items to prepare for: equipment setup, reducing my weight as much as possible and improving my physical climbing ability. I now know that I have to work on the fourth and most important item and that is my mental state during this race. I tend to try to stay up with the group that I am with. My goal in the next seventeen weeks is to learn where my boundaries are and stay within them as much as possible.

You'll still find me going out to join the weekend riders at GearWorks as much as I can. The coming weeks and months. This can only help me to be a stronger rider...

Only seventeen weeks to go.  Game on.