Autumn.

It has gotten chilly in Chicago.

All of those Chicago Oktoberfests (including one hosted by one of my Siebel classmates) seem to have had their intended effect: a classic Midwest cold fronts moved through, fast and rowdy, on Sunday afternoon, and I've cemented my shorts and flip flops in the closet until next year. Or, I can keep my fingers crossed for a balmy Portland December.

The change of season has corresponded with an increased level of difficulty in brew school material: our instructors have taken us on a headlong dive into the biochemistry of yeast. Our class topics this week have included: "Yeast Metabolism," "Yeast Propagation," and "Yeast Morphology." What started as a cursory review of high school biology quickly became a test to remember the different chemical structures of alcohols, aldehydes, esters, acids, and ketones. The "A" groups all have "H," we determined. And then we moved into a discussion of oxidative decarboxylation, which, as it turns out, is essential to making beer taste good in two different ways. (Robin--it's both to produce acetaldehyde + ATP and to convert acetolactate into diacetyl). By noon today, one of my classmates said, "Give me a beer. If it tastes bad, I'll figured out how to fix it. I don't care about acids."

Despite the newfound challenges in class, the folks in my section of the classroom have rallied together around our common need for snacks in the classroom, inability to focus on class without coffee, and, mostly, our shared enjoyment of in-class beer tastings. Yesterday, we got to try American styles.

In one of my older posts, I talked about sensory tastings. Those are the sessions where we gain palate acuity (oh yes) by learning to pinpoint specific flavor compounds and developing a common "brewers' vocabulary" about flavor and taste. It's the way that brewers address the classic adolescent question of "How do I know if what you call 'blue' and what I call 'blue' are the same?"

Styles tastings, by contrast, serve to learn about classic brewing traditions and evaluate examples of different beer styles. Last week we tasted classics from the English/Irish/Scottish traditions--Fuller's ESB was an instant favorite and has got me thinking that maybe we should have a flagship beer after all and it will be an ESB. And yesterday, we tried "American" styles. Later in the term, we'll do Belgian and German tastings.

Now, most "American" styles of beer are just hopped up versions of classic European styles. So hoppiness, more than any specific style, is American. And there are a handful of nascent beer styles that are truly unique to the US (I think of steam lagers, American ambers, the "Belgian IPA," colonial porters, pumpkin + chile beers, fresh hop beers, double IPAs and the long list of experimental aged, strong, sour, and wild ales that are very New World). Those singularly American beers are getting easier to come by, but they don't make for much of a coherent group for tasting. So hopped up European styles it was.

We began with Michelob, which I'd never actually had before, and folks described it as grainy, sweet, sulfury, fizzy, and a little oxidized. Seven beers later we would have moved through gluten-free beers (Redbridge), fruit beers (Unibroue Ephermere), American ambers (Avery Redpoint), American pales (Sierra Nevada), American IPAs (Southern Tier's very grainy and woody offering) and, finally, onto strong ales.

A lot of friends who I've talked to since coming to Chicago have asked how my level of knowledge compares to others' in the class. And my response has consistently been that I'm right on par with most folks at Siebel: if I knew any less, I'd be swamped, and different folks in the class have different areas of particular expertise. Mine happen to be in knowledge of beer styles.

This made our tasting of the final four beer styles especially fun for me. I had the benefit of knowing what to expect, got pleasantly surprised, and got to watch many of my classmates have their first "imperial" beers.

Up first was the Double/Imperial IPA from Green Flash in San Diego. Double IPAs are strong, bitter, and boozy. Our instructor, who is also the vice president of Siebel, took a sniff after the obligatory taster's swirl and shouted "I'm from British Columbia and my god if that's not fresh BC bud!" Everyone agreed, and some noted hints of rubber, cheese (a common off-aroma with older hops), and citrus.

From there, we moved to Great Divide's Old Ruffian, an American-style Barley Wine. Barley wines don't actually have any wine in them; they're just beers "brewed to wine strength" and often has flavors more typical of digestifs. Great Divide's is one of my favorite beers of all time--it combines the viscous, sherry flavors of classic British barley wine with hop flavors and bitterness that must exceed 100 IBUs. Barley wines, in some ways, are just maltier, hoppier versions of an IPA, and Old Ruffian shows that linkage better than any other barley wine I've ever tasted.

After a quick overview of imperial stouts via Sam Adadms Imperial Stout, we moved on to the real treat of the day: Old Rasputin12th Anniversary, a bourbon-barrel aged version of North Coast's classic Old Rasputin imperial stout. Keith admitted that it had not been his intention to buy and share this special beer (which prices at $22/500 ml bottle) with the class, but when the local beer store was out of regular Old Rasputin he had no choice. I don't know that I've ever had a beer that balances barrel-aging, and the consequent vanilla + oak/woody flavors, with malt sweetness. The bourbon and coconut aromas were sweet, and the lingering bitterness and warming balanced well with the full body and creaminess of the beer. Though class was officially dismissed after we had tasted and discussed that final beer, most everyone hung on to enjoy the last of their few sips. It was enough (and too much) to send me back to studying for the evening in the naive hope that I can brew a beer so perfect.

Lay of the Land: Sizing Up Chicago Beer Culture, Part 1

This was the first weekend that I had free to explore Chicago, so I finally feel more comfortable with the different neighborhoods of town. Admittedly, the south side remains a great unknown expanse that I've only ventured to once; all the great beer bars and brewpubs are north of the river, after all. As I've traveled around by bus, cab, and train, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how Chicago and Portland compare to each other. And clearly, there's some asymmetry here: Portland, the 29th largest city in the US, is roughly five times smaller than Chicago. But this is a beer blog, and in that realm there's asymmetry too.

As far as beer culture goes, Chicago just simply can't compete with Beervana, and my brew school friends will be the first to tell you that not a day goes by where I don't talk (at length) about how superior Portland's beer culture is to Chicago's. Comparisons are odious, so I'll spend some time talking about my experiences traveling the Chicago beer bar and brewpub scene, which isn't all that bad once I stop comparing it to what we have out west. It is the home of beer school, after all.

So, how is Chicago's beer? Or, more precisely, how is Chicago's beer culture?

For now, I'll give some general observations and in future posts delve into more depth about some of the specific bars, restaurants, brewpubs, and breweries that make and break Chicago as a beer destination.

Chicagoland has a handful of great local breweries: Goose Island, Three Floyds (in nearby Munster, IN), Half Acre, Metropolitan, and Two Brothers, which is in Warrenville, put out consistently good beers. This is especially true for Three Floyds (FFF in beer geekese). Three Floyds is famous for it's annual Dark Lord Day, the single day of the year where they release their much lauded Russian imperial stout. Beer lovers from around the country travel to Munster to share and trade rare beers and get a bottle of Dark Lord. They routinely get labeled the Picasso or Pollock of the craft brew world by fawning writers. Their beers are aggressive, hoppy, and alcoholic; most of them are also excellent.

Goose Island is the hometown favorite with a production brewery and two brewpubs--one of which happens to be across the street from Siebel. Their Belgian-style beers are especially impressive: Sofie is a relatively new saison that was partially aged in wine barrels and fermented with the bacterial yeast brettanomyces to give it a dry, "barnyard" character. It's one of the best new beers in the US market that I've been able to try. And Metropolitan and Half Acre are upstart operations in Ravenswood and North Center that have put out some solid first brews.

Beyond the great local breweries, Chicago has access to and distribution from many of the best regional craft breweries in the US. Bell's, Founders, Tyranena, Great Lakes, Southern Tier, Southampton, Brooklyn, Surly, New Holland, and Dark Horse all have great tap and bottle presence here that makes us West Coast beer nerds drool. The day that New Glarus gets distributed in Chicago will be the day that it goes "from good to great" as a beer city.

The distribution system seems to favor packaging breweries here, and many bars have a good variety of tap offerings. The better "beer bars" (The Map Room, Hopleaf, The Local Option, The Bad Apple, The Long Room, Risque Cafe, Sheffield's, Delilah's, Clark St Ale House) all have a solid, rotating selection of beers, averaging 15-25 taps and many bottled offerings. Even bars that aren't nearly as beercentric seem to offer at least one or two alternatives to macro beer with New Belgium, Goose Island, Sam Adams, or Sierra Nevada often available.

Perhaps the most unique and healthy facet of Chicago's beer scene is the preponderance of German bierstubes. Given the city's ethnic heritage, this isn't surprising (there are plenty of Irish bars as well, though their crowd is more car bomb than craft beer), but it does also seem to have spawned an interesting reaction from non-bierstube beer bars, which choose to pass on German beer in favor, sometimes exclusively, of Belgian or American craft beers. The Hopleaf, for example, keeps Belgian beers on tap that can't be found anywhere else in the city; Risque Cafe, Jerry's Sandwiches, and Local Option deal almost exclusively in American craft beer. It's a de facto balkanization of ethnic beer cultures that I've never seen so pronounced elsewhere.

The shortcomings in Chicago's beer culture, however, aren't hard to spot. Some of the hiccups include widespread price gauging, limited distribution for brewpubs' beer, lack of social media around beer culture, outdated/limited information online from different breweries, and a paucity of one-off and reserve beers seeing tap action around town. The first three of these can be small gestures that promote beer appreciation. The lack of one-offs is probably a function of having fewer really small breweries (in general) and fewer brewpubs that distribute any beer beyond their home pub. For now, Chicago seems to be a city with great beer but not great beer culture, all structure but no superstructure.

That is a two-week, snap judgment. Perhaps as I spend the next five weeks exploring the city more, I'll find that the culture of beer runs deeper than I think. I would be happy to suffer that surprise, and the only way to do that is to keep exploring.

Prost!

Gospel and homily in the brewhouse

After our return from Wisconsin on Monday, we dove head first into a week focusing on wort production in the brewhouse. Wort is the sugar water that leaves the brewkettle ready for fermentation--full of hop compounds, proteins, carbs, and minerals; it is basically "beer before alcohol." So starting Tuesday morning, we moved swiftly through most of the brewhouse process: water preparation, grain milling, mashing, cereal cooking, lautering, sparging, boiling, whirlpooling, cooling, aerating, effluent disposal, and cleaning. By Friday afternoon, our theoretical beer was ready to sit and let the yeast do the work.

For many of the folks in the class, these topics were a welcome relief after Week 1's emphasis on raw materials production. These are the daily operations of brewing, and for both homebrewers and professionals, it was easy to tie these lectures into personal experiences. For me, personally, it was enlightening to get a perspective on how things might work in breweries of all sizes--from a small 2 bbl setup to a production brewery that puts out 4 billion+ bottles a year. And, I think that I finally understand why many of the Leadville brews came out with lower hop utilization than Andy and I had planned.

Despite my familiarity with the material, the volume of information--ranging from process to theory to equipment functioning--was daunting, and I found myself struggling to keep separate the 11 purposes of boiling from the 6 reasons that brewers sparge from the 7 different hose and pump sizes that work for different sized breweries. So, to keep the information straight, I scaled back up to the macro level and decided to tell myself story of the brewhouse. Happily, my classmates agreed that there's something about what follows that makes everything in the process easier to remember.

As we moved through the brewing process, what became clear is this: the creation of beer is about a battle of good versus evil. There is such a thing as normative ethics, and nowhere do they better play out than in making beer. There are evil forces that attempt to ruin beer at every turn in brewing, and it is the good brewer's responsibility to shepherd the wort through the danger-ridden landscape of the brewhouse. What are these evil forces? It is the trifecta of low extract, low enzymatic activity, and low yield as well as their servile henchmen high viscosity, haze, flavor instability, lowered hop utilization, harsh polyphenols, alkalinity, DMS and poor foam retention.

Their threats take different sizes and shapes in different parts of the brewing process. In the mash evil uses strategies like high temperatures and pH. Later, during the sparge, it becomes essential to keep water at 170 degrees to balance the threat of high viscosity and the extraction of tannins.

But the brewer is crafty, and no obstacle should get in the way of a brewer and his beer. With control over temperature, chemicals, flowrate, time, and equipment design, the forces of beer destruction can be kept at bay one batch at a time. Every time you taste a good beer, and especially every time you taste a great beer, good has triumphed at least one more time.

What you can see from the highest building in Chilton

On Monday, we trekked up to Chilton, WI (pop ~3700) to visit the Briess Malt & Ingredients Co's original plant. Anyone who's ever ordered brewing malts from an online retailer has probably heard of Briess. They are the top producer of specialty malts for brewing, which means that homebrewers and craft brewers are highly indebted to their work. Their clients include Bell's, New Glarus, Goose Island, Sprecher, Left Hand, and Sand Creek. Plus, they offer products ranging from liquid malt extract to torrefied grains to malt powder. They also make a killer chocolate malt ball, and each of us was lucky enough to take home a bag at day's end.

There was plenty of logic to this field trip. We had spent the first three days of the course studying the malting process, and, as we quickly learned, maltsters know plenty about making great beer, and brewers ought to know more about how malt is made great. In fact, advances in malting in recent years have rendered obsolete centuries-old brewing practices that originated when brewers had to coax specific barley enzymes out of dormancy because maltsters hadn't done enough to prepare the malt for the brewhouse.

So what is malting exactly? Malting is the process of taking raw barley and getting it ready for brewing by cleaning it, steeping it, letting it germinate so that important sugars are accessible during a brewer's mash, and kilning or roasting it. Each of these phases requires specific space and equipment, and we were lucky to get an insider's tour of the malting facility as well as the packaging area.

A vertical design is common, if not ideal, for malthouses, and, Briess, founded as the Chilton Malting Co in 1876, follows this pattern. Barley is elevated to the top of a tall, columnar building and fed into the steeping tanks for the first phase of malting. We climbed several sets of creaking stairs to the top of the malthouse--easily the highest point in Chilton. I had to do a modified pull-up to see inside the tanks, which gave off a distinctive fish food aroma. We caught glimpses of the final aeration and draining process in one of the tanks and watched another go into "overflow," which is the process that removes undesirable contaminants and dirt from the barley.

In the germination room, we compared kernels that had been sitting for 24 hours to those that were just being emptied from the steeping tanks above. Typically, germination lasts 4 days, and by the end, forked rootlets are easy to see on each kernel. Large, ribboned augurs turn the malt twice daily so that the nascent rootlets don't get matted and tangled. Not surprisingly, we weren't able to go into the kiln or roasters, which reach temps of 450 degrees Celsius, but the roasters, as one might expect, looked like oversize coffee roasters--spinning rapidly to dry and darken specialty malts that add color and flavor to beer.

There was something surprisingly antiquated about Briess. Many of us were surprised by the fact that so much of the malthouse is made of wood. Briess even keeps around an old circular roaster that is ceramic and is heated by wood fire. Retro signs like "Practice good housekeeping: everything in its place" abound. "I'm surprised it hasn't burned down," quipped one of my classmates as he took a few steps further out into the parking lot before lighting his cigarette. Indeed, the Briess plant in Chilton, with its manual pulleys and noticeable lack of computers, felt far more artisinal than I had expected. Consider, for example, that a full batch of chocolate malt provides enough "dark malt" for several moderate-sized brewpubs to make stouts for at least a year. And what differentiates one chocolate malt from a darker roasted malt that a brewer might want to use? The employee who's been working at the roaster for 15 years just knows "when it's ready." And he does. The visual inspection tests they do are consistently confirmed by the work done by the quality assurance chemists in the lab next door. The director of operations, who gave us an introductory presentation, was insistent: the human eye is the best test they have for batch readiness.

It was a reminder that brewing beer, particularly craft beer, is deeply connected to agriculture and dependent on the work of twenty-one folks who operate a small malting plant. Prost to them!

Manifesto: Blog as Soapbox

I just returned to Chicago from a quick trip up to Michigan to see my family and celebrate my grandfather's 90th (!) birthday. This was the first time I'd seen anyone in my family since deciding to head to brewing school, so my future plans were of great interest. As I explained what lay ahead and what my/Danny/Jason's plans are, I was struck by a peculiar reaction. Many of my grandparents' friends, while encouraging and interested, hadn't ever heard of a brewpub or had a craft beer. "I'm not a beer drinker, but good luck," one said.

In Portland, that type of interaction would have been impossible. I believe that non-US citizens hoping to take up residence in Oregon are required to take a beer identification test as part of their naturalization exam. So leaving Beervana is a good reality check: not everyone knows (or cares to know) what an IPA is.

That reaction sent me back to thinking about one of the recurring topics that our instructors at Seibel love to push: as brewers, we are ambassadors for beer and beer's image. It's understandable that people who lived the majority of their life between the end of Prohibition and the rise of craft beer know little about craft beer. But, our instructors' emphasis on this theme stems from a more deep-seated frustration with the way in which beer is perceived (and marketed) in American culture. Beer remains, in many people's eyes, the unsophisticated swill of college parties, ultimate frisbee tournaments, and Joe Sixpack. The image of beer is firmly entrenched in the a perception of beer that is cheap, undistinguished, and quickly consumed.

"It's hard to be an advocate for beer drinking and for beer's healthful qualities if you're carrying a keg around in your gut," Maryjane Maurice told us. Adding, "there's no such thing as a wine bong." So the "Joe Sixpack" myth hinders beer appreciation as much as history. But how inaccurate is that image? How bad is it really?

It's silly to think that beer can or should ever fully shed it's Joe Sixpack reputation. You can't argue away the existence of beer games and toys--nor can you argue away their fun. There is a time and a place for that use of beer too--just as champagne or wine is overindulged at certain celebrations Purim, for example, comes to mind. But, as the most affordable and drinkable of alcoholic beverages, it's hardly surprising that beer is the drink of choice for gross and speedy indulgence. It's also important here to disentangle causality and correlation. Beer is the most common medium of binge drinking, but it's not the cause. Beer can be cheap and not harsh, and the fizz goes to your head. Plus, last time I looked, you can't purchase Everclear in a keg.

But beer, just like the people who drink it, is multifaceted, and it's wrong to asume that beer can only suit one type of social environment. The rise and proliferation of craft beer has proven this, and as up-and-coming members of the brewing industry, it's my and my classmates' responsibility to advocate for a new understanding of beer.

What does effective beer ambassadorship entail? Nine components come to mind, but someone will have to send me a tenth to make it look nice and round.

1) Encouraging people who drink "bad" beer to try something new, especially when the time is right. The flip side is also true: there is a time and place (parties, summer, beaches) when American light lagers ought to be the beer of choice.

2) Pushing "non-beer drinkers" (who are typically older and wealthier) to try a beer that will re-define beer for them. There's a false logic that says that people have to be "introduced" to beer via a mild style, like a golden ale. Those beers are too remniscent of and often sweeter than light lagers. And while a double IPA or barleywine might be too boozy and bitter, complex styles like saisons, sours, American ambers, or alts win converts because they are more complex, and "winelike."

3) Brewing pilsner and more complicated light ales. This ties in to the idea above: too many of the "introductory" beers brewed today are bland to win non-beer drinkers over. My mother consistently finds blonds and goldens too sweet, but she enjoys the balance in pilsners. No one has ever been wowed to become a beer drinker by an American blonde ale, balanced as the beer may be.

4) Fostering curiosity in young drinkers. If people wants to know about and learn to appreciate beer, let them. That's how connoisseurs are created.

5) Pursuing interests other than beer. Brewers and beer lovers need to role model that beer is a central but not all-consuming part of life. Read, get outside, then drink.

6) Educating consumers about beer styles, flavors, and production. Drinking beer is an agricultural act, and people should be connected to the work and vision that go into making a great pint of beer. Their appreciation is enhanced through understanding.

7) Offering better food menus for beer. While pub grub has a time and a place, too many American craft brewers settle for unhealthy fried foods to serve with their beer. How about a brewery that features salads or exclusively vegetarian fare? Pizza, burgers, and sausages can make for great beer-food pairings and a delicious meal, but when the majority of brewers succumb to those items as the principle of menu creation, it only serves to perpetuate the Joe Sixpack image.

8) Participating in political activism on issues of agriculture, temperance, and environment. Similarly, doing community outreach--supporting local events or creating them on your own--helps foster the image of the brewer (and beer drinker) as engaged in community. Oh, and it's the right thing to do.

9) Moderating drinking to any given social context. This means appreciating restraint in many cases (and proving that you can have a beer at lunch or brunch) and indulging oneself in others. By now, I'm sure it's clear that I don't believe in the right to condemn or condone any type of drinking en absoluto. There's a time to party hard and a time to drink not at all. There is a time where it's OK to be Joe Sixpack. Yet, for most people, this moderation will mean thoughtful regular use, occasional abstinence, and occasional over-indulgence.

So, that is my form of ambassadorship. It is a way of taking pride in the work I have done and will do. It's a realistic approach to loving and spreading the love of beer. Let the conversions begin.

Back to baseline

It took us nearly three days of class to get through the details of malting. As I wrote before, malting is a fascinating field that blends agriculture, economics, industrial design, biochemistry, soil science, and brewing, but its intricate processes take place far from the day-to-day of a brewhouse. So, it was a refreshing change Wednesday afternoon when we moved on to sensory analysis and flavor identification in beer.

My old roommate in Leadville, Danny, always tried to argue that "in matters of taste there is no right and wrong." And while that may hold true for whether one TV show is better than another, taste--as a tool for brewing and understanding beer--isn't to be treated so trivially. Good tasters take years to develop and refine their palate, learning personal bias and taking it into account; practicing a shared vocabulary with other tasters. It is an inexact science, as we were often reminded, but it is not without discipline. Through years of trying beers and setting them to memory, I was excited to finally have a chance to take some formal sensory training and see where my experience put me.

As we returned from our final break of the day, each seat in our class had nine glasses and one bottle of Budweiser in front of it. Budweiser, we learned soon after sitting down, would be our "baseline beer." We would be given tastes from nine different bottles of Budweiser that had been spiked with various componds--ranging from table salt to isovaleric acid, sucrose to geraniol. The goal was to learn to identify the most common off flavors in beer, such as oversweetness (or harsh bitterness), metallic flavors, skunkiness, and so on. After each taste, we took notes on the spiked beer and then returned to our baseline palate with a sip of our control beer.

To the straitlaced, this may seem like alcohol abuse in class--tasting 12 beers side by side. This is nonsense. Just as tasting is about precision, it's also about moderation. Over an hour, we each drank the equivalent of one pint of beer. No one's palate ever got better trained by buying into the abstinence-or-abuse paradigm.

The spikes were each set to three times the perceptible threshold--present enough that they should be detectable but not overwhelming. Interestingly, most of the flavors (and aromas, in some cases) were immediately obvious. Sample 8, spiked with isobuteraldehyde, had the unmistakble aroma of warm Grape Nuts and tasted dry, harsh, and dusty. Sample 10 which had been treated with isovaleric acid was gooey cheese ("They smell like his feet after a match," said one of the brewers in our class from Cerveceria Modelo about another). It didn't taste nearly as bad as it smelled. Sample 5, which was 25 bittering units stronger than typical Budweiser, tasted quite good.

The tastings will continue through the course--both on particular beer styles and on flavors and off-flavors, at a rate of one a week. Spreading it out helps all of us avoid the number one killer of sensory skill, and also another reason to moderate rather than abuse beer: tongue fatigue. When that hits, it's time to go back to brewing theory.

Salud!

We're here to make beer that enhances people's lives

Beer school started today.

Technically, the program is called the "International Diploma in Brewing Technology," a 12-week intensive training course on all aspects of brewery operations, spanning two continents and now in its 17th incarnation. Day to day, we study the minutiae of beer production: today's principal focuses barley farming and steeping, for example, occur thousands of miles and (potentially) many months before the barely--then malted--makes its way to a brewhouse to become beer. A brewmaster who knows where his ingredients come from and how they come to be is, of course, both a better brewer and a better community member.

To spice the material up, as professors are wont to do, folksy anecdotes and "did-you-knows" abound. Some fascinating: ergot, a common pest on grasses and grains, had a role in the "lunacy" of some of the women accused in the Salem witch trials and continues to impact crop yield today. (LSD is a derivative of ergot, so its hallucinogenic reputation is well founded). Others, that flat-bottomed steepers are more air efficient than conical ones, take a true beer geek's palate to appreciate. But at day's end, this is beer school.

Even Mary Jane Maurice, our master maltster and first instructor, would agree. Mary Jane is one of 87 people in the world, and the lone American, to have passed the Malting Association of Great Britain Diploma exam. And yet, her lecture began with an image far from the technical slides that we'd see later in the day. Her opening image, Edouard Manet's realist painting Au Cafe from 1878, in which a man and woman relax casually at a bar and enjoy a beer. "This is what this is about," she said, "we're here to make beer that enhance people's lives." Indeed.

Live from PDX

Hello Friends-
Thanks for checking out my brew school blog! I leave Portland today to spend the next two and a half months in the International Diploma in Brewing Technology program with the Siebel Institute of Technology and World Brewing Academy.

While it's hard to leave Beervana and the Northwest behind, there are new adventures to be had in the great beer cities where the course takes place--Chicago and Munich. My goal is to post here three or four times a week with some of the latest details about this 12 week adventure. Hope you enjoy some of the observations.

Prost!