Jeff and I are about to start our 4th brew day some time this month. We already have two   batches ready for drinking and the 3rd batch has been bottled and will be ready to drink soon too. I don’t even know how many 6 packs we have stored away in the basement right now, but it’s a lot.

I realized recently that I never even told you how our first batch turned out! So, I thought I’d show you just how it stacks up against the original Sierra Nevada Pale Ale that it was crafted to imitate.

The Sierra Nevada pours very crisp and clear…

Ours was a little cloudier.

We left the last bit of ours in the bottle since it’s full of settled yeast sludge. Yuck.

As you can see, the Sierra Nevada (left) is noticeably clearer and lighter in color.

Jeff checking the two in the light…

But how does it taste? Well, when we first tried it it was very close in flavor to the original. Crisp and clean with a subtle hoppiness and bright citrus. There was a bit of a strange flavor that Jeff noticed more than I did that he attributed to not letting it age long enough, so we decided to give it more time to age in the bottle.

2 weeks later, we tried it again…

This time it poured much clearer as the yeast sludge had completely settled and was caked into the bottom hard enough that it didn’t stir up again. The flavor had taken on a bit of a fruity note though. Not bad, just not as near to the flavor of the original Sierra Nevada as it was before.

Overall though, I’d say our first brew was a complete success. The beer tastes really good even if it isn’t exactly like the beer it was modeled after.

Now we’re trying to decide what to make for our 4th batch. Definitely something fresh and clean for summer like an IPA.

What is your favorite summer beer? Or, what’s your favorite refreshing warm-weather beverage?

April 5, 2012 Alayna Discussion 11 comments

Tada!

In case you missed it…

Step 1: Building the wood canvas
Step 2: Priming and painting

The next step was to draw up a template as a guide for where to hammer in the nails. Like magic, I opened up my giant drawing pad I’ve had since high school and found a pre-drawn circle in it that was almost big enough. If you don’t have a magic drawing pad full of pre-drawn circles or an enormous compass just lying around, you can try any of these methods to draw a circle.

Remember your trusty old protractor from high school math class? He misses you. Find the center point of the circle and draw a line through the diameter in any direction. Line up your happy little protractor and make a small mark every 10 degrees all the way around, then flip it over and do it again. Remove the protractor and use a long ruler to draw more diameter lines that line up 10 degree marks on opposite sides with the center point.

I extended the lines past the circle edge because I decided that I wanted it bigger, so I just measured an extra inch outside the edge to place each of my dots.

Pop Quiz! If you’ve placed dots every 10 degrees on a circle, how many dots do you have? If you said 36 because there are 360 degrees in a circle — congratulations, you really were awake in class! You can do more or fewer dots if you prefer, just make sure there’s an even number of them.

Ok, time to center the template on the canvas. Use your ruler to find the center of the canvas and line it up with the center point of the template. Tape it down with any tape that will peel up easily without leaving adhesive behind (Hint: Don’t use duct tape. Why would you do that?)

Take a nail, and start tapping in pilot holes all the way around. You’re not trying to hammer the nail all the way in, just enough to leave marks for later.

Ok, now here’s where I made things harder for myself than they had to be. I’m gonna show you what I did first and then tell you what would have worked better.

I was worried that because the face of the canvas was so thin, that the nails might not stand up straight in the finished product when they had string on them tugging in different directions. I ordered some florist’s foam off Amazon to adhere to the back of the canvas so that the nails would have something deeper to hold on to.

I made sure to cut it thinner than the canvas is deep. Wear safety glasses and even a face mask for this if you have one. This stuff shreds and gets crunchy green dust everywhere.

I then used the template to mark off where the circle was on the front by using a pencil to mark through all the little holes I made in it with the nail earlier. Then I glued down pieces of foam making sure to cover every dot and let it dry.

And that is where I went wrong. The glue on the back of the canvas made it really hard to drive the nails in. It would have been much better if I had just driven all the nails in first and then just stuck the foam onto the nail ends in the back. It would have held just as well and been a lot easier. Oh well.

Ok so, back to what I actually did. I started by just hammering the nails in enough to get them all in, then I went back around and hammered them all down to the height that I wanted. I did this on a rug so that the canvas wouldn’t damage the floor.

And now we make art! I tied the crochet thread to a nail at the bottom and started by making the big star-like pattern you see in the background. To do this, I looped it around every 33rd nail working clockwise until it came back to the start. You won’t have to count anymore once you get it going and can see the pattern more fully.

I immediately started the next later by looping every 18th nail, still working in the same direction until it came back to the start. At that point, I was pretty happy with the look of it, so I tied it off.

The last step was to trim the ends off and seal them with a little dot of clear-drying glue.

And there you have it! You can add more layers if you want a fuller look or even use several different colors of thread. I may end up putting one more layer on this one sometime in the future, but I’m pretty happy with it for now.

Can’t wait to start the next project!

March 29, 2012 Alayna Discussion 13 comments

This race did not go so well for me. Let me start at the beginning…

Friday night, I got no sleep. I have no idea why. We just got a brand new mattress that I’ve been sleeping very well on otherwise, so I’m not sure why I kept waking up every hour throughout the night. I got up with no problems though, and didn’t really feel tired.

I ate a bagel with goat cheese, which is normally my favorite for pre-workout fuel, but I had a really hard time choking it down and didn’t even finish it. I did manage to gulp down about 8 oz. of water though.

The race started at Decatur High School, which is actually walking distance from my house, so I walked over there about 15 minutes before start time while Jeff finished getting ready so he could take pictures as I passed (the course went through our neighborhood.)

As the race started at about 9:15, I felt totally fine. I knew that I hadn’t really trained for this race because I’ve been busy doing the LiveFit training program which restricts cardio in the first month, but it was a beautiful day and I was feeling good and trusted in my overall fitness level to get me through the 3.1 miles even if I didn’t set any records.

I wasn’t even half a mile into the race before I started feeling tired though. My legs were heavy and achey, my head was pounding, and my neck was tight. I was huffing and puffing and really having to push myself to keep moving, even while only doing around a 12 minute mile pace.

As I passed Jeff around 1.2 miles in, I let myself stop for a minute and confessed to him that I was really struggling. I ran around the corner but was walking again by the time I was out of sight.

As I continued on, Jeff started walking down to the high school to meet me at the finish line. Really, I was hurting so badly and breathing so hard that if I didn’t know that he was at the finish line waiting for me I would have just cut back through the neighborhood and headed home.

I tried hard to run as much as I could for the rest of the way, but it wasn’t a mental game anymore, I had a physical need to walk instead of run. I saved up my energy, and ran the last little bit onto the football field and through the finish line.

39:32, my slowest 5k yet.

I’d say that it’s just a product of not having really trained for this race, or that I didn’t sleep enough or ate breakfast too close to the start time, but I know there’s something else going on here. I seriously felt like a might have an aneurism around mile 2, and that makes absolutely no sense for someone who has a very healthy diet and exercises regularly. It also makes absolutely no sense to me that I’ve been trying my hardest to be a runner for nearly 3 years and I still to this day cannot run an entire mile without stopping. I mean, I could, but it’d leave me too exhausted to go any farther than that.

And then something clicked when I was talking with Jeff about this the other day. I just had blood work done recently so he asked me if my iron levels had come out as low because it sounded like I might be anemic. This was odd because I’ve been tested for anemia many times throughout my life because I’ve always shown the classic signs of iron deficiency, the most notable being persistent fatigue, but my iron levels have always been normal. I have; however, had extremely low levels of B12 for at least the last few years which has no dietary explanation. As it turns out, a serious B12 deficiency can manifest in much the same way as iron anemia, with chronic fatigue and difficulty breathing.

So, I’m writing all this because I intend to pursue some options with my doctor to get my B12 levels back into a normal range, and see if that has any affect on my running abilities and my overall energy levels. I want to share a bit of this journey here on the blog because I’m sure I’m not the only person out there who really struggles with exercise endurance, and if low B12 turns out to be the magic answer for me, then maybe that information can help someone else too.

This may have been my slowest race yet, but I’m actually extremely proud of myself because I truly had to fight to finish it. I’m hoping that if I can figure out what’s going on with this intense fatigue, it’ll be the last one that beats me.

March 26, 2012 Alayna Discussion, Fitness 13 comments