5x5k Budapest (The Blue Danube Waltz Run)

The second run of our 5x5k Challenge:

BUDAPEST - The Blue Danube Waltz Run

Our Budapest 5k came the day after our Copenhagen run, so we weren't feeling exactly spry at the start. We walked a few blocks from our rented studio apartment to one of the bridges that spans the Danube river, connecting Buda and Pest. Margit-Sziget (Margit Island) lies in the middle of the river and is almost entirely parkland - and it even has a rubber running track around most of the perimeter!

The Route

We ran a big loop, stopping to check out some ruins and marvel at the view.

We passed a water park (which looked realllllly tempting in our sweaty state) and finished near the musical fountain. It wasn't on, but there was a cool statue and beautiful flowers.

Looking south toward Parliament, which is on the Pest side of the Danube

Walking back, we stopped atop the bridge to look at Parliament. We also saw these large buoys set up and though we didn't know it then, they were part of the Air Race being hosted while we were there. I didn't know there were airplane races, but there are - and later in the day we got to watch!

The tall church in the middle is St. Matthias, on the Buda side of the river

Triumphant Photos!

Jacob said I was failing to look triumphant enough, so we took this too.

CANNOT believe we missed Wu-Tang Clan by ONE DAY!

5x5k Copenhagen (The Bikes, Bells, and Baby Ducks Run)

I have always found running to be a great way to get to know new places - and new people. I was lucky to have a wonderful running (frunning) group in Syracuse and was lamenting the loss of our fun runs, when Jacob issued a challenge for us to tackle during our trip to Europe.
(Oh yeah, we went to Europe - will get to that in a day or two!)

The 5x5k Challenge:
Run a 5k in each of the 5 major cities we are visiting on our trip - 
Copenhagen, Budapest, Bratislava, Graz, and Prague.

These runs are not about speed, but about getting out, exploring a new city, and seeing what we see. It is always acceptable to stop to take a picture!

First city up was...

COPENHAGEN -The Bikes, Bells and Baby Ducks Run 

We ran our Copenhagen 5k on our last morning there. Like most places on our trip, Copenhagen is hot right now so we got up and running by about 7:45 - we tried for earlier, but the jet lag was still getting us.

The Route

We started out from our fabulous AirBnb and made our way through part of the botanical garden and to the Kastellet, a star-shaped fortress by the water.

Kastellet

Halfway around, we came upon the famous Little Mermaid statue.

The similarities - uncanny!

We also saw statue/fountain and a church that appeared to be built out of flint. As we passed the church, bells across the city began to chime 8 o'clock - kind of magical.

We poked our head into the fort - cool!




















We passed a windmill, managed to avoid getting hit by bicycles (I swear, everybody bikes!), and ended our run along a waterway - and even saw some ducklings!

Duckies on the pond, duckies on the pond....

1 down, 4 to go!

We also saw this tiny Tesla - nifty!

Jakoberfest - A Brew How-To

Our move to Syracuse has given me the chance to play at quasi-homesteading. We've been having fun taking on some culinary experiments, including:

Quick pickles (quickles!?)

Bread made from spent grains leftover from home-brewing

Roasting our own coffee beans

New pizza dough recipe (revolutionized our pizza nights!)

Creative uses for our newly-started CSA from Early Morning Farms, including kohlrabi coleslaw (eh), biscuits with dill, and lots of salsa, omelets, and salads.

Since moving to Syracuse, Jacob has gotten back to one of his favorite hobbies: home brewing. So far, we (I use 'we' loosely - I help, but he is the brewmeister!) have made an American Pale Ale, a Saison, and a Gingerbeer. We also had the pleasure of touring a brewery in Utica and doing some beer tasting around the Finger Lakes with Siri & Ben Baker. I've been learning a lot about how beer is made and how you can get different flavors, and thought it'd be fun to show you how we're brewing it up in Syracuse.

Last Saturday we brewed our next batch of beer - an Octoberfest-style Ale, dubbed DaLager's Jakoberfest.

Here is a basic how-to brew:
Probably one of the most important brewing rules is that you have to keep things clean. Yeast is what makes beer beer, but there are all kinds of bacteria that would also enjoy growing in warm, sugary water - you want to make sure only the yeast you add survive! Most steps involve sterilizing buckets and utensils - so assume that was happening too!

The process actually began Thursday, when we boiled and froze about 2 gallons of water. Saturday afternoon, the brewing began in earnest.

We heated about 2.5 gallons of water to 170 degrees, then let it cool to about 150. 

We then added several pounds of barley grain (different types and roasts of malt can be used to achieve various flavors) and soaked the grains for about 45 minutes. This draws the sugars out of the grains. This process is called the 'mash', and it produces a brown malty liquid called 'wort.' We kept the wort warm in the oven, since our stove is too hot for the job. 

 

Next, we dumped the wort and grains through a mesh bag into our very classy brewing buckets - basically just 5- or 6-gallon plastic buckets with spigots.

Once we drained as much wort out as we could, we 'sparged' the grains (now called 'spent grains') with clean warm water to get out any remaining sugars. Then the wort went back into the rinsed out brewing pot and onto the stove, where we brought it to a boil.

Traditionally, the three basic beer ingredients are barley, yeast, and hops. Hops are a cone shaped flower that give beers some of their distinctive aromas and bitterness. If you've ever had an IPA, that bitterness is from hops. We buy pressed hops, so they just look like pellets. Once the wort was boiling, we added some of the hops - we also added more later, which has a slightly different effect on the flavor. 

We then added malt extract. This is basically the powder form of what we got from mashing the grain. You don't need to use malt, but then you need to mash more than twice as much grain and we just don't have a big enough pot! You could also use only malt, but the flavor is much better when you use actual grain too.
You can also use other sugars - honey, cane sugar, etc. - as well as other flavorings. When we made ginger beer, we added honey, ginger, lemons, and cinnamon.
Jakoberfest didn't need anything fancy though.

Adding the hops momentarily turns the wort green, but it goes away.

 

We also used some products to make the beer clearer (I don't know how they work). Because home brewing uses live yeast through the whole process, including carbonation, the yeast can make beer a bit cloudy. Commercial brewing usually pasteurizes the beer, killing the yeast, and then carbonates it more like soda.

But we didn't add the yeast yet - adding yeast to boiling water would kill them!

After the wort boiled enough (maybe around an hour? I lost track), we needed to cool it off. We have a copper coil device that can connect to a faucet and run cold water through the coils, then empty out another tube. In addition the the coils, we got out the giant ice cubes we'd made and put them in the bucket as well.

Then we poured in the wort - and tried not to spill too much! The ice melted fairly quickly, and we hooked up the copper coil cooler and let it run for awhile until the beer temperature fell to around 70 (or a bit below). At that point, we 'pitched' the yeast, put on the cover, and waited. 

The yeast starts to go nuts eating the grain sugars, producing gases, and turning the sugars into alcohol. The airlock, shown in this picture, has water in the two little tubes, which allows air to bubble out but keeps anything from going in.

So then you wait.

And wait.

Until the water in the airlock starts bubbling, and then you know that the yeast are doing their job.

We will let the beer ferment for a week or two, then transfer it to a secondary fermentation bucket. This transfer allows us to remove some of the sludgy solids that sink to the bottom during fermentation. (Kind of gross, so good to get them out of the beer!)

After another couple weeks, we'll prime the beer with a little more sugar (the yeast will have eaten most of the sugars available, so this will get them going again) and bottle the beers. Another week or so and the beer will be carbonated and ready to drink! 

In the meantime, we'll enjoy the bread I made using the spent grains from the mashing process - healthy recycling! (Well, sort of healthy...until you eat 5 slices in a sitting...)

Caveat: this is not a recipe. I wrote this from my memory, and I'm not the one who really knows how to make beer. If you want to home brew, look up real instructions - or talk to Jacob! OR come visit and join us for a drink!

Camping!

Hey friends!
So we've been a bit busy. We moved from Singapore to Syracuse, NY, got an apartment, bought a car, I started grad school and now have two classes under my belt and am gearing up for Fall semester, and Jacob has been practicing, working on finding students, and working 2 jobs. And brewing beer. In the midst of that, we welcomed Ari Henrik Lippert, our nephew, to the world on June 27th, celebrated our 3rd anniversary in July, and had a visit from my sister Heather! Lots of joy. Busy joy!

Amid all this, we got to escape for a few days of camping, and since pictures are the best part of most blogs...

We camped in site 100 at Delta Lake State Park, a little ways from Utica, NY. We arrived in time to eat our take-away burritos and then hurriedly set up our tent as it began to rain. And then it rained...and rained, and rained all night. We could have gotten wetter, but it was not a great night. Fortunately, the sun came out in the morning, our neighbors loaned us some rope for a clothesline, and we managed to get everything dried out. Plus we had blueberry pancakes for breakfast, which revived us.

 We drove to Pixney Falls and took a short hike, crossing many footbridges, to the falls. Beautiful! 

 We then picnicked before making our way to Boonville. Unfortunately, we arrived too late to check out the Lumberjack Competition (we'd only just heard about it). BUT we weren't too late to go to the Boonville Black River Canal Museum. Yeah, that's right.

 I'm fairly certain we now understand how locks work.

The " 's " on this sign appears to have been an afterthought - an important one.

Our bikes fit weird on our bike rack, which means I spend 50% of drive time looking back and hoping they haven't fallen off yet. 

Our first night fire proved challenging. We tried the log cabin and the teepee method, but try as we may, the wood was damp and would not consent to burn. Finally, we tried the 'go buy newspaper and lighter fluid' method, which proved successful. And we made pie-iron pizzas (in the dark).

One of the best parts about camping is eating - with impunity. Here, a pensive Jacob fries up some bacon. It occurs to me that Jacob and Bacon are composed of almost the same letters...

I took a LOT of pictures of leaves and the forest. So much green!! And it was so nice to be outside in cool weather (or, at times, COLD weather)!

I want to blow this picture up really big and hang it on my ceiling!

We shared our site with a little red squirrel.

We drove over to Utica and got to go on a fantastic tour of Matt Brewery, which brews Saranac and Lake Placid Beers, and was where Blue Moon and Sam Adams really got their start. Our favorite part was definitely the bottling floor, which we got to see in operation from the observation deck. SO MUCH BEER! I could have watched for hours. We thoroughly enjoyed the tasting room, and then made our way back to our campground where we laid on the beach for a good hour, doing absolutely nothing. Good vacation.

Our second fire attempts were much better, and we got to experience the magic of 'Mystical Fire,' a packet of powder that you drop in your fire and the chemicals make the flames turn all different colors. It. Was. Awesome. Very mystical. We tried to take lots of picture. 

Then, as we were enjoying our Mystic Fire, Jacob says, "Hey, what's that over there?" and shines the flash light on a raccoon size creature. Only this creature had a big white stripe down its back! I realized I had no idea how to deal with a skunk walking into your campsite...so I decided the best thing to do was to vacate the campsite. We just ran straight to the neighbor's fire. They were so nice, and pulled up some chairs and invited us to wait while the skunk passed through. Fortunately, the skunk moved on and left the air fresh and clear - and now as I unpack the camping gear, I can be thankful that I'm just unpacking regular camping gear, and not skunky camping gear. I'll drink to that!

WHOA!!! TOTALLY MYSTICAL!!

So that's what we've been up to. I hope to get back to blogging more, but with classes and a research assistant position, we'll see what happens. Please let us know if you're passing through Upstate NY - we'd love to catch up!