Monday, August 15, 2016

Adding a grilling dimension to all the ramblings

I started this blog naively enough. I wanted to write about beer and running, nothing more, nothing less. I really didn’t know where it would take me and figured I might even get bored with it after six months and quit. But in a surprisingly short time, I started meeting all sorts of interesting people and learning all sorts of new things writing away in my little corner of the Internet. While this was personally rewarding, the content noticeably improved and more people started coming over, so presumably others were getting something out of it too.

After more than seven years of that, the blog certainly evolved. I don’t write much about running as I used to, since there's nothing more tiresome than a runner continually talking about their running. The writing on beer became more technical, the more I learned about the subject. No longer do I see any urgency in breathlessly writing about each new beer consumed or brewpub visited. I’ve spoken to quite a lot of brewers and others in the beer industry, building an increasing reservoir of beer knowledge to tap into for each story. Learning and writing about how beer is made, where it comes from, and the cultural and economic forces that shape it, is what really drives this blog. In many ways, beer is a specialized form of food.  

So with that in mind, I’m adding a new dimension to this blog. This summer, I bought a Weber Spirit E-310 gas grill and reignited my love of grilling. There's something about careful management of the raging fire activating the chemical reactions within the food on to create the distinctive flavors we all love that appeals to the techie scientist in me. Of course, there's an art and intuition required for those grilled flavors to come alive which simply cannot be reduced to a set of rules and formulas. It's this art and science of grilling I'll be exploring through new recipes, techniques and discussions I'll be sharing here. 

Grilling and beer are pretty complimentary activities, so I don’t think this is too dramatic of a shift. Since I’m still doing the running thing, don’t expect many stories about big hamburgers or barbecuing huge cuts of meat. I’ll make no claims you'll be reading about super-duper healthy grilling here, but expect more about fish, chicken, vegetables than you’ll find in other grilling sites out there. I just hope you enjoy reading about what I'm up to at the grill and will literally savor the results.

So moving forward, expect to see a post on grilling once or twice a month, starting tomorrow. Not sure where it will all lead to, but then that’s all part of the fun.

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