Nutrition Failure

Getting old is no fun.  That's what I've come to conclude on the eve of my 39th birthday.

I've been biking for years, but there's no hiding the fact that my biking would improve greatly if I:

1. Biked more often
2. Cut my pizza, burger, and beer intake

#1 I'm always trying.  #2 just isn't going to happen.

Whoops! Wheat Brew

My wife loves wheat beers.  When I say she loves them, I don't think that really does her love for wheat beer justice.  She really loves wheat beer.

At least a couple times a year, I brew a wheat beer for her.  In August, I wanted to get a wheat beer fermenting for her, since we were running dangerously low on homebrew.  I decided to do an extract for the simplicity and because I was doing it during the week, it's much quicker and easier to cook and clean up.

Mad Quest for Bottling - Part Deux - Success! (Sorta)

I am happy to report that I've had some success with bottling from the keg.  It's not as easy as the video I posted before makes it seem, but it did work.

I think the key to bottling from the keg is high carbonation in the beer before you scale it back.  I found that with the higher carbonation, the release of CO2 as you fill the bottle is not as substantial and doesn't leave the beer as flat.

The Mad Quest for Bottling

Since switching over to kegging most of my homebrew, I have not had the same opportunity to bottle beer.  This is not a particularly missed endeavor.  Bottling homebrew is messy, time consuming, and ultimately anti-climatic because the beer has to be conditioned in the bottles for about 10 days before its ready to drink.  I found it important to have homebrew already bottled, in order to have some to drink while bottling.  When I started kegging I set aside the bottling stuff without hesitation.

But now that I've been kegging for a while, I've run into an unexpected challenge.  When I want to share my homebrew, I have to clean the house first.  Why?  Because I can't take it with me, which means cleaning the house for company.

Saving American Roads... Again.

I saw a short, interesting article on Autoblog Green about how bicycles built American roads:

In the late 1800s, a business man by the name of Albert Pope had noticed the growing popularity of bicycles and started up his own manufacturing company. In order to make his product more appealing to those who lived outside of well-manicured city streets, Pope began a crusade that would shape the face of transportation in America. He started a magazine with the sole purpose of bringing road quality to the public eye, donated vast sums of money to MIT to start a new road engineering program and eventually succeeded in convincing congress to found the Office of Road Inquiry – what would eventually become the Federal Highway Administration.

Many might not recognize Mr. Pope's name, but you may know about his company, Columbia bicycles.