No matter the kind of protein—steaks, chops, plant-based burgers—there’s an art to the magic of creating the perfect, juicy, well-cooked (but not well-done!) piece of meat (or “meat”). We asked two very different grill masters to break down the perfect technique.

Ethan Brown is the CEO and founder of Beyond Meat, the first plant-based meat company to ��as the poultry, beef, and pork at Whole Foods. Brown’s newest burger, The Beyond Burger, is being hailed as a holy grail for the plant-based industry.

Chef Tim Love is the highly acclaimed chef at the helm of Texas-based restaurants like �����Ի� . He also hosts CNBC’s Restaurant Startup alongside Joe Bastianich.

Together, their intel will bring grill glory to meat lovers and vegans alike.

For Burgers,��Go with Many Meats (or No Meat)

Some of the best burgers in the country use a custom blend often incorporating chuck, brisket, sirloin, or short rib. If you go custom, remember your fat content: You want 20 percent��fat. If you go plant-based, know you’re in good, next-level science hands. The folks at Beyond Meat just launched the Beyond Burger, which is similar to red meat down to the way it “bleeds” (beet juice) and smells beefy when it hits the grill.

For Steaks,��Pick the Right Cut

Don’t buy a cut that you would usually stew or roast (like short ribs or brisket). Stick with the tenderloins, flatirons, rib eye steaks, and strip steaks. When picking the meat, look for as much marbling as possible and a nice, deep red color. If it’s a lighter color, then it’s been sitting out and has oxidized.

Take the Heat

Grillers often err on the side of caution and set their temperature too low. With red meat and plant-based products alike, you want high heat. But not too high! You want two temperature zones: one with a high heat to achieve that crispy sear and the other no-so-high to wrap up the cooking. On gas grills, this means one side is low and the other’s high.

Take Your Time

Make sure the meat is very cold to form that great textural crust on the burger without overcooking it. And make this your mantra: Don’t pat the meat down, don’t touch it before the flip, and flip the burger only once. The more you move the meat, the drier it becomes.

Follow the 2×2 Rule

If you’re cooking over charcoal and aren’t sure when it’s ready, hover your hand two inches above the coals. If you can handle the heat for two seconds (exactly two seconds!), then you’re ready.

Get Creative to Enhance Flavor

When cooking up steaks, Love uses peanut oil to really deepen the roasted flavor. It has a higher smoke point than other oils, so if you’re grilling at high temperatures (and you should be), the oil won’t burn and taste bitter. For an extra-smoky flavor on steaks, grill them directly on the coals. This is especially good for thinner steaks like skirt or flank steak where a great sear is all you need, or for steak fish like tuna. Also, if you’re using a gas grill, use real wood chips. Try soaking them in your favorite spirit or wine for extra flavor.

Don’t Underestimate the Cool Accoutrements of Summer

Fire-proof gloves are an often-overlooked tool, especially for those who work with open fires regularly. You can pick up hot coals and grill racks, or reach over the grill to turn the meat in the back. Plus, they last forever. Another worthwhile investment is a charcoal chimney—ten times better than lighter fluid and you don’t get that gas flavor in your food.

Pack Extra Salt and Pepper

You want juicy meat? Salt is your friend. It helps cells retain water and produces a juicier, tastier meat. Generously salt your steaks once or twice before they hit the grill, then again as you slice it for extra flavor. Pepper will only expand on the spice elements of the steak or burger. Don’t be afraid to mash some peppercorns to create some texture.

Keep Your Toppings Simple

You’ve already got a quality cut (or mash-up of plant proteins). You don’t need to gussy it up with inch-wide heirloom tomato slices and over-the-top sauces. Maybe put some bacon on top for an extra crunch, but otherwise, keep it simple. On the sauces front, if you really crave that tangy pink-hued spice, get your own canned chipotle peppers to cut down to a paste and mix it with mayo.

The post How to Grill Anything From Veggie Burgers to Rib Eye Steaks appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Earlier this week, , an effort to enable one of three athletes—Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya, Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia, and Zersenay Tadese of Eritrea—to break the two-hour marathon barrier by next spring. The brand's announcement of its “moonshot”��was thin��on details: Nike just said it would use “a system of groundbreaking innovation” to achieve the��milestone. The project��has about the specifics of the effort, the physiological requirements of the three athletes, and the ripple effect that such an attempt could have on the sport. Much��of this discussion revolved around whether Nike would so much that running's governing bodies would not sanction the world record.��

To help us cut through the noise, we put three authorities in the running community—Alex Hutchinson, the covering Breaking2; of the Mayo Clinic; and , author of —in conversation.��

OUTSIDE: First, let’s talk about your initial reactions to the project. When did you learn about it?��

JOYNER: emailed me . I was thrilled about it because, as everybody knows, I started yapping about breaking the two-hour barrier in the late ‘80s, and in the early ‘90s. So, as a scientist, I was obviously thrilled to see that someone wanted to test some theoretical ideas I’d generated in the real world.��

FINN: Well, the thing that jumped out at me when I first saw it was the date. The idea was to do it in a few months. And my initial instinct and reaction was that that's impossible. It's not like we've discovered some incredible new talent. We're talking about Kipchoge, an incredible talent. He's already run incredible races at his absolute peak. I was a bit confused, and then I got the impression that they were going to do something to bend the rules or break the rules. I heard��that this is not going to be a legitimate world record, and that threw up all sorts of issues for me personally.��

It brings up the whole question of it being a scientific experiment, which is fine. In some ways, it brings up the issues of it being a marketing stunt, because they're getting a lot of coverage. But it's a sport. And my big feeling is that the point of sport is to play within a set of pre-fixed boundaries. If you're going to break those rules, what's the point? And we know this has been done in the past. We have Justin Gatlin getting Usain Bolt's world record using a wind turbine. So my reaction was, as a sports fan, what's the point? This isn't sport. I can see the scientific points and the human endeavor point, but as a sports fan it’s grating.��

Alex, what was your reaction? In , you predicted that the two-hour mark would be broken in 2075.��

HUTCHINSON: I laughed when I first got the phone call from the editor-in-chief at Runner's World asking if I'd be interested in covering this. And when I asked what the timeline is and he said next spring, I thought it was a bit of a joke. But I also figured that a big company doesn't make big announcements like that without putting some serious thought into it.��

I'm a pessimist, especially when it comes to the marathon. These things are hard. That 2075 conclusion was how I figured things might trickle out in the normal course of events. But Mike and I have had many conversations, and so have many other people, about some of the things that could be done right away without involving any magic or any new training techniques, just optimizing the things that aren't optimized at big city marathons, like course design��or drafting, where you can immediately cut off a minute or two. I don't know all the details of what Nike is doing and I can't talk about some of the stuff that I do know, but my sense is there's enough theoretically to get within shouting distance.��

Mike, your 1991 paper concluded that, using your model, 1:57:58 was the fastest hypothetical marathon time. Does that number still hold up for you?

JOYNER: Yes. But I think the key thing that people need to realize is that I wasn't exactly trying to make a prediction. I was trying to better understand the factors that are key determinants of endurance performance. The purpose of modeling in science is strictly to identify the gaps in knowledge and to identify new areas for people to think about.

As a scientist and a de facto sports historian, are you excited about this?

JOYNER: Well, first of all, I hope they do it on a legitimate course. People have had world records that have been sort of set up from time to time—certainly Roger Bannister did. That's probably the best known barrier broken by one of the last of the great amateurs. What people have to know for the sports history is that it's very rare for people to break records by one��percent or more. The last time that happened in a distance race was a long time ago. And to get under two hours, we're talking about breaking the record by about 2.5 percent. What I've always told people is that I think it's possible for someone to get into the 2:01s now, or relatively soon, and then the fun begins.��

Ed Caesar wrote in his Wired piece, “If the attempt is successful it will be the most significant moment for running since Roger Bannister’s first sub-four-minute mile in 1954.” Do you agree with that?

HUTCHINSON: I think that will depend on the circumstances under which it's run. And I think some of the sort of consternation that has arisen in response to the announcement is because we don't know what's happening. So people are speculating that it's going to be downhill with rocket packs on their backs and roller skates on their feet. And that would not be all that significant. So��I think the significance is going to depend, in a very fine way, on the details.��

And to digress for just a second, I want to pick up Mike's point about Roger Bannister. You could basically lift a lot of the quotes from today and apply them to what people said about Bannister's four-minute mile attempt. These are not new points. It's a fiction that records have always just happened to come along naturally. A lot of barriers are broken with very specific attempts.

FINN: Another problem I have with this��is that the marathon world record is almost in an unprecedented space right now. People have been breaking this world record time after time over the last five to six to��10 years. This is not a record that's long overdue to be broken. We're already seeing boundaries being pushed. It's already a very extreme, impressive record.��

HUTCHINSON: I think what we're talking about here is not Eliud Kipchoge suddenly learning how to train harder and suddenly getting faster. The main thing that's going to happen here is the environment being changed. So if he can run a 2:03 effort on that day, Nike believes they can alter the environment in such a way that will be a two-hour marathon. And I understand that it will make lots of people unhappy, and fair enough, but it's not that they think they've magically discovered a way of training better.��

FINN: Another thing that's different with Bannister's record��is that here we've got a shoe company, a clothing brand, that is basically conducting an experiment, and it's selecting athletes through some sort of selection process. It doesn't feel like the same thing. It doesn't feel authentic. It doesn't come with the human story you get with sport and sport is very much a human story about striving.

HUTCHINSON: Personally, my perfect world of sports would be that everyone gets the same equipment instead of it being a technological race like sailing or modern pentathlon at the Olympics. You show up and you get the boat you're given. And so the athlete wins, not the technologist. That's my vision of sport. But ultimately the rules are what they are. And I don't blame athletes or corporations for trying to enhance within the rules, and I think it's up to us as sports fans to ask��that authorities make the rules as restrictive as possible in order to to keep the focus on the athletes. But they'll look for whatever edge they can get until we make stricter rules.��

Nike’s Vice President��of Footwear Innovation Tony Bignell��said recently: “The sub-two hour marathon is one of those epic barriers that people bust through. It's like breaking 10 seconds for the 100 meters or four minutes for the mile. At the end of the day we just want to show it can be done. We want to show that it's within the capability of human physiology.” Adharanand, you've been critical of this effort and why Nike says they want to break the record. How come?

FINN: I'm not against going for records and breaking records. If they're going to do it on a legitimate course, in a legitimate way, that's incredible. I have no problem with that. But this doesn't have that same feeling and I feel like that message is going to get lost. We're going to have this situation where we have this false world record, and Nike is going to push it, it's going to be a big story, it is going to undermine what's already happening in the sport, which has been incredible. You run 2:02:57 and the reaction is, “Ok, we're nearly there,” rather than, “Wow, that's incredible.”��

And in this whole story, it's Nike against the record. Eliud Kipchoge hasn't had a single quote out of his mouth, we haven't heard a single thing he's saying about it. He's just a cog in the wheel rather than the driving force behind it.��

HUTCHINSON: In terms of the points that Adharanand is making about running a sort of adulterated 1:59, and then everyone for the next 10 years not caring when people run 2:01 under more normal conditions, I think that really would be unfortunate and that's something that's a legitimate worry from my perspective. My hope is that the significance of the attempt will be in proportion to the legitimacy of the attempt.

And not all rules are equal. If they do it by not having a set start time in order to wait for the best wind or if they have a logo that's too big on their singlets or something, thus making it not an official record, that won't bother me. If it's downhill, then I hope it gets less attention. I hope the attention it gets is commensurate with the legitimacy of the effort. I will say that after my visit to Portland, I was more convinced that this is a legitimate attempt than I was before��I visited.��

Do you know if the athletes are going back and forth between East Africa and Oregon or if they are in Oregon for the next few months?

HUTCHINSON: They're training in their home environments. They've had a couple of visits to Nike but the next training, and the next interactions with the scientists, will be in their home countries. They're training with their own coaches. Nike's not dictating the training or their nutrition. The athletes are basically doing what they do, and Nike is mainly focused on conditions and equipment.��

Have you assigned any sort of probability of this happening?

HUTCHINSON: In my head, there's between a one and ten percent chance of it happening. And that's depending on exactly how they decide to do it. There's maybe a 50 percent chance that it will be faster than the current world record.��

JOYNER: I would agree with Alex, and I stick with what I've been telling people since the world record started to fall a lot the last four or five years. Let's get people in the 2:01s, then the fun starts. It should be a terrific achievement.��

FINN: I personally think there's almost zero percent chance of them running sub-two hours legitimately on a course and with a record that can be ratified as a world record. I just cannot see any way Eliud Kipchoge will suddenly cut three minutes off what he's already done. I mean, I've run with the guy, and he's an incredible athlete, and I'm happy to be wrong, but that's my feeling. ����

Any last thoughts?��

HUTCHINSON: It's going to be interesting to watch, and the extent of the respect we should give it will kind of have to wait a little bit. That's frustrating for me as anyone else, but let's see what they do before we either condemn or celebrate it too much.��

FINN: The two-hour barrier is clearly a romantic and amazing story. It's something people are going to be shooting for no matter if this succeeds or fails. It's going to continue to be a point of discussion until it happens, which may be years and years and years from now. My personal feeling is that it's going to take someone who's as physically gifted as it gets. Like when Usain Bolt suddenly rewrote the rules of sprinting. It's going to take someone of another level somehow if it's going to happen sooner, rather than through natural progression.��

JOYNER: If it happens, do I get to go to the top of a mountain and say, “I told you so!”?

The post Running’s Greatest Minds on Nike’s Two-Hour Marathon Project appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

The post A Fire Truck Turned ���ϳԹ��� Vehicle That Tours the Middle East appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

The majority of us—TV viewers, fantasy strategists, and Olympics��bingers—think of our athletic heroes as having high-powered nutritionists at their side, serving a militant diet where everything is as plain as oatmeal with a dot of honey. But many athletes around the world eat things that would surprise even the Chopped��judging table.

“Most of the international athletes I’ve encountered tend to prefer what’s common in their home country.��I’ve found that they don’t have bland diets,” says Shawn Arent, sports medicine and performance expert and director of the Center for Health and��Human Performance at Rutgers University. “We’ve even seen a problem when foreign athletes come to the U.S. and access more processed foods. In many cases, I’ve seen those athletes gain quite a bit of weight as they adapt to different foods.”

We connected with athletes around the world to discover what’s in the training meal��(or cheat meal)��that they can’t get enough of.

Adam Ondra, Rock Climber, Czech Republic��

In the Czech Republic’s southwestern city of Brno, climber��Adam Ondra��relies on��local produce from the lowlands for superfoods. Colder months yield a side dish of raw sour cabbage that’s chock-full of vitamins.��Poppy seeds are in every bread and bun on the plate or blended into a smoothie. For the traditional Czech taste, though, he turns to svickova: a thin cut of beef served with cream-based gravy, bread dumplings, and cranberry topping. The dish is made by the masters (grandmothers), and Ondra indulges once, maybe twice, a year—one must stay lean on the cliff faces.

Mira Rai, Trail Runner, Nepal

The petite, 108-pound Mira Rai puts away the remarkable amount of calories trail runners need by eating the traditional dish,��dal bhat. The Nepalese staple includes a heaping pile of white or brown rice;��a side bowl of lentils, spinach, and other mixed veggies;��occasional slices of meat;�����Ի� a spice mix of coriander, cumin, garam masala, and turmeric. Like all Nepalese dishes, dal bhat is��eaten with the hands.

Atsede Baysa,��Marathon��Runner, Ethiopia��

This year’s Boston Marathon winner, Atsede Baysa, lives and trains 45 miles west of Ethiopia’s centrally��located capital of��Addis Ababa, in a small town near the Chilimo-Gaji forest. She supplements standard starch and protein combos of pasta and fish with national treasure injera chechebsa. Injera is Ethiopia’s sour and spongy bread, rich in both iron and carbohydrates.��Chechebsa, commonly known as kita firfir, is fried injera seasoned in a berbere sauce made with hot red pepper powder, all served with honey. The dish provides protein and fat for Baysa, who eats it with a tilapia-like white fish called Nile perch.

Jain Kim, Rock Climber, South Korea

The summer heat in South Korea calls for cold noodle soup, and climber��Jain Kim favors the wildly popular naengmyeon. Seldom served in other Asian countries, the buckwheat noodle soup comes with sliced beef, cucumbers, Korean pear, and a soft-boiled egg. A simpler variation, called mul-naengmyeon, relies on beef broth alone, but Kim opts for the bibim-naengmyeon, which incorporates spicy red chili peppers into the broth.

Max Matissek, Windsurfer, Greece

Some of the best local produce in Naxos, Greece, are juicy tomatoes, which windsurfer��Max Matissek eats on top of daily salads with Naxian cheese—imagine a hybrid of cottage cheese and feta. His protein comes from chicken souvlaki, the lightly marinated meat skewers over rice, with a side of Naxian potatoes—oven-roasted and mixed with local olive oil, garlic, lemon, and pepper.

Mo Hrezi, Marathon��Runner, Libya/United States

As a��former Italian colony, Libya boasts cuisine with Mediterranean, North African, and Middle Eastern influences. The country’s residents take the preparation and sharing of food seriously, and Mo��Hrezi, a Libyan-American runner with a carb-heavy, spicy-infused diet, is no exception. When he visits his parents and sisters in Tripoli, where he hopes to one day move back after finishing college, his most savored dish is rishdet burma, a warm, soupy, spicy bowl of homemade pasta with a tomato base, chickpeas, fava beans, lentils, fenugreek, and gideed (dried and salted meat).

Farida Osman, Swimmer, Egypt/United States

For Olympic swimmer Farida��Osman, the late-morning spread in her Zamalek neighborhood of Cairo includes ful medames—local beans seasoned with olive oil, lemon,�����Ի� cumin—and traditional molokheya, made by mixing the dish’s namesake��plant leaves with coriander, garlic, and chicken stock. Keeping with the sharp flavors of Egyptian cuisine, Osman tops her dishes with roumy, the native��crumbly cheese similar to a manchego.��

Irina Sazonova, Gymnast, Iceland

In her hometown of Reykjavik, the nation’s capital, 24-year-old gymnast Irina Sazonova prefers meat-centric dishes like kjötsúpa (Icelandic lamb soup). The lean meat is raised more responsibly than anywhere else in the world thanks to Iceland’s robust agriculture regulations. Cuts are often served bone-in, and the soup adjoins plenty of thyme, oregano, carrots, cauliflower, potatoes, brown rice, and rutabaga (turnip). ��

Annika Langvad, Cross-Country Mountain Biker, Denmark

When in Copenhagen, childhood staples reign supreme for daytime snacks, and it’s all about the nationwide-favorite smørrebrød at lunch. For��Langvad, a small, thin slice of Danish-style rye bread serves as the base for the open-faced sandwich.��Her favorite topping combination includes warm leverpostej (liver paté��meat spread) with pickled beets and fresh herbs. The Danes often take their smørrebrød simple, like Langvad’s, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find tricked-out combinations, like a smoked halibut rillette with pickled radish, capers, and rosemary.

The post Rishdet Burma, Not Rice Cakes: 9 Athletes’ Favorite Regional Dishes appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Geetika Agrawal arrived in Lima, Peru, at the beginning of May,��to a new home, a new language, and a new national drink to sip on—pisco sour.��She bought flowers and groceries,��unpacked her 50-pound suitcase,��organized her spices, and rolled out her yoga mat. She studied a map and a calendar of events for��the next four weeks.��She walked down the street and familiarized herself with the co-working space she’d head to each morning—a trendy office with a garden, small cafe, and a slide connecting��the first and second floor.��

This was the 12th��time Agrawal completed the ritual this year, having already hit locales like Prague, Hanoi, and Santiago. From June 2015 to May 2016, she unpacked, settled in, and repacked for a new country every month. And once the year is up, she'll return to the her advertising job��back in New York City.

The wanderlust that pervades our Instagram feeds and ��seems totally at odds with the fact that hundreds of millions of vacation days. ���ϳԹ��� of the Internet, most of us have a hard time actually taking leave of the office. The plunge digital nomads take—quitting their jobs, becoming Insta-famous, living in a van—feels unrealistic for a lot of people. A company called Remote Year is offering an alternative to the 9-to-5 or drop-off-the-grid dichotomy.��The��sell: You can grow your career while living in a new city every month for a year. Applicants must already have a job that's okay with��the idea of working remotely for a year. (Agrawal is a unique case among the group—her company is allowing her to take a year-long “sabbatical” for the trip, and she's running her own small business during her Remote Year. But she'll return to her regular job when the year is up.)��If selected, participants pay a total of $27,000, and��Remote Year handles all other logistics, including��city-to-city travel plans, accommodations, and co-working spaces with 74 other professionals on the trip.

At first glance, it seems ludicrous to pay a price tag that’s very close to some people’s full salaries just to work in a new city each month. But after the $5,000 upfront deposit, it adds up to $2,000-a-month rent and a full year of travel with other young professionals. A growing number of people want in on that plan. Greg Caplan, the company's founder, and Heather Lee, communications director, shared via e-mail that they received about 50,000 applications for 2016-2017 programs, which will be Remote Year’s second round.��

Agrawal started the year in a group of 75 professionals, ranging in age from 23 to 64 and comprising over 30 nationalities. (There’s another group of 75 “remoters,” who followed the same itinerary a��few months later.) No, they're not all from the tech space—well, about 50 are. There are also��writers,��consultants, small business owners, artists, even��a lawyer. The company wants a diverse mix with the goal of fostering exchange of knowledge and experience.

For Agrawal,��it would be far cheaper to go it alone,��staying in hostels and bed-and-breakfasts. But “the idea of doing it alone was daunting,” she says. “I was mentally ready to travel for a year, I just wanted to focus on my work and have someone else worry about the logistics. And the experience in a city is significantly better living in [your own] apartments. Having a kitchen, a couch to sit on, and a coffee table make all the difference.”

The monthly stability and the opportunity to explore without travel hassle are the biggest draws for many. Remotes are people who enjoy their work, crave the road—or aisle seat—and love meeting professionals across industries in places like Kyoto, Japan. As Lee points out, “Whether at home or away, the monthly expenses of living in a metropolitan city��are not too far off [the expense] of traveling the world and keeping your paycheck.” And day-to-day for Agrawal, she sees the benefit. “We basically work during the day and explore the city every night.” It’s the adult table for study abroad students—on steroids.��

Remote Year is also selling something the intentional travel community values above all else: experiences. With a network of colleagues and built in connections with locals via coworking spaces, there’s little adjustment time and rapid immersion. In each city, the company organizes outings and cultural activities. A highlight for Agrawal was��a weekend motorcycle trip to an overnight homestay in Mai Chau��Valley��in��Vietnam.��

As the startup’s first year comes to a close, it’s important to point out the hiccups Caplan and his team encountered in their first year. With some questionable accommodations in a few cities,��like a bug-filled��high-school dorm in Slovenia,�����Ի� failure to uniformly��implement policies like an early-exit fee, the first batch of travelers dwindled down to a 50 percent of��its initial size, according to . When asked to comment on the article, Lee said, “We are constantly learning from feedback we take from the participants and make frequent of changes to ensure everyone continues to have an amazing experience.”��

We spoke to Joe Matta, a consultant out of New York City, as he wraps up his 12th month��with Remote Year. He touts how the intangible aspects of the trip—selecting a diverse group of people and developing community through co-working spaces and group excursions—were well executed by the Remote Year staff. But in terms of the tangible aspects of the business, “They’ve had a few misses,” says Matta. “There’ve��been some good and some bad months. They failed a little bit in the sense of accommodations, workspaces, and travel, but they are learning, and they’re good about responding to feedback.”

Despite their shortcomings, Caplan and company see more and more remotes wanting to capitalize on the opportunity to get up, go, and keep the job. They’re expanding their team to include a community manager and an operations manager to travel with each of the four programs launching concurrently this fall, for which the application period is currently open. Remote Year will also be adding local City Managers to their roster to ensure the most local experience possible for their travelers. Some of the cities on the next itinerary include Tel Aviv, Phnom Penh, and Medellín.

We asked Matta and Agrawal about the qualities that make a person a good fit for Remote Year. Matta said, “You have to be willing to make [Remote Year] your own experience… You have to be independent�����Ի� strong-willed—a person that’s as happy in a large group as they are alone.” And as cliché��as it may��seem, despite having a built-in group of fellow travelers, remotes need to be adaptable self-starters, remembering that travel is one of life’s most unpredictable ventures.��

The post Take One Year, Travel Through 12 Cities, and Don’t Quit Your Job appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Ah, summer. A great time to retreat to the garage (or bathtub) and give DIY beer a try. Pore over all the technical books, blogs, and instruction manuals, and if all goes well you’ll show up to the barbecue with an impressive six-pack (of homemade beer).��

We went an extra step for you and went straight to��some master brewers for their home brewing secrets.��Jonathan Porter of in Los Angeles and Bert Boyce of in New Mexico gave us intel that will have��your friends begging��you to bring a keg or two next time.

If You’re Just Starting Out:

Read Up Before You Start

Consider this the start of your summer reading list:

• John Palmer’s , a back-to-basics book that’s available to read in its entirety online, or , which provides 80 recipes
• Jamil Zainesheff’s ��on the choosing and care of, you guessed it, yeast
• Ray Daniels’s to build the foundation for creating your own beer recipes
• Michael Jackson’s to go deep on beer culture—from those who make it to every flavor nuance—and reconfirm your brewing enthusiasm

Keep. It. Clean.��

One of the most common pitfalls among home brewers surround sanitation issues during the cooling process. Reduce the risk of contamination by purchasing a coiled immersion chiller, which is easy to clean, to cool your wort. Boyce always uses a copper immersion chiller and packs the sink with bags of ice.��

Prep Your Yeast Right

Two big rules of thumb for healthy yeast: Don’t let it sit in the fridge for months, and make sure you’re giving it the right nutrients and amount of oxygen to get the job done. When investing in tools and equipment, find fermenters that are easy to clean and inspect. Also, invest in oxygenation,��whether in-line or a wand/stone. You will see a dramatic difference in fermentation performance with pure oxygen versus aerating by hand. When the yeast are happier, they'll reward you with better tasting beer.

Save Your Money on Yeast Starters

You should strongly consider making your own yeast starter. It’s the best way to ensure your fermentation cycle starts off right with an active fermentation, it lowers your chance for contamination, and unless you’re making a super low-gravity ale (basically, lower sugar-to-alcohol ratio), you’ll have to spend a lot of money on multiple premade packets of the stuff. Craft Beer and Brewing . Either way you choose, you’ll need to plan ahead—if you’re DIY-ing your yeast starter, you’ll want to give it 24 hours to keep reproducing after the initial half-hour fermentation. If you’re using the premade stuff, “wake those pitchable packs up and get them ready for your wort” a few hours before you need to add them, says Porter.��

Stay Away from the Stovetop

Boiling over is a disaster to clean in the kitchen, but it's not unlikely that it'll happen during the process. If you have a propane burner and patio, garage, or driveway space, heat your concoction there. Brewers should have a hose or a spray bottle at the ready when bringing the kettle to a boil or adding hops. And at any point after the boil, use lids to cover any open surfaces�����Ի� supplement with paper towels moistened with alcohol or sanitizer to keep any bacteria from falling in.

Go With Glass

Sure, plastic fermenters are much higher quality than they used to be—they don't weigh as much and don't shatter if you drop them—but Boyce says glass is still the superior way to go. It lasts longer, won't leak, and it's much easier to clean for guaranteed sanitation.��There's no good reason to skimp.

Find the Goldilocks Alcohol Level

Keep the alcohol level light, but not too light.��You get more flavor in stronger, more alcoholic beers, but it makes it��trickier to manage higher gravity fermentations if you're just starting out. Going too light, though,��leaves less room for error as there's nowhere to hide any flaws. Stick within��a range of 5 to 7 percent��ABV if you're a first-timer.

If You’re More Experienced and Looking to Step It Up:

Get Fancy, But Intelligently

Learn the difference between the various malt types and hop varieties before worrying about what chocolate-covered bananas taste like in a beer. You’re better off taking on a more challenging style beer like a clean Pilsner or a sour.

Give Barrel-Aging a Try��

“Wood aging is all about surface-to-volume ratio. The smaller the barrel volume, the larger the surface area, and the faster it ages,” says Boyce. So start with a small barrel and work your way up. “I had a 12-gallon oak barrel that I aged about 20 beers in before I ever got my hands on a [53-gallon] bourbon barrel,” Porter says. Don’t expect to age it as long as your local brewery would, either. Taste regularly and decide for yourself when it’s ready, but it could be on the order of just a couple weeks.

Enter a Competition

Home brew competitions are held across all major craft brew cities. They’re great places to get help and get feedback from more experienced brewers. Check out����for upcoming contests.

The post 10 Beer Master-Approved Tips for Stepping Up Your Home Brewing Game appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

There’s a technique to filling up your photo album with shots from your kids’ growing-up years—and then��sharing those��images��with the rest of the world. We asked National Geographic photographer and his son, , for a few tips. Aaron has shot around the world for dozens of publications�����Ի�, in 2002,��he����in 154 days documenting what he saw. His son��has over 210,000 followers in his own right,�����Ի� (with dad’s help) he just launched a full of portraits from the American West. Mind you, he’s 6 years old. Together, they’ve honed a formula for taking real shots of family adventures.��

Show Us the Real Stuff

I struggle with giving tips to parents trying to make idealized versions of their children. Social media is dangerous like that because we all share the “best” or “most attractive” versions of ourselves, which makes for unreal expectations for our followers.��

We are messy people. We have crappy days. Children have tantrums, parents have tired expressions, we step in dog crap, and we make bad pictures. We don't share much of that, but that’s real life. Take pictures of your kids crying and quote their hilarious tantrums. That would actually be interesting. ��

Go On That Road Trip You’ve Been Talking About

I absolutely encourage families to take a road trip! Last year, we traveled in a small bubble trailer and did some camping and ate bad food at diners—it made great pictures. It’s an American tradition for good reason. And if you’re looking for a great National Park to celebrate the centennial, go to Joshua Tree. You can’t go wrong there!

Kids Want Their Own Camera? Start with the Basics.

The is a fun camera—it’s the only one we use. I wanted Hawkeye's first camera to be analog, like the cameras of my youth. I wanted this partly out of my own nostalgia for film and the scarcity of physical images today, but also because I didn’t want to see a 4-year-old learn about taking photographs by holding his finger on the touchscreen of an iPhone until the device was filled with hundreds of photos of nothing. I wanted to find a way to slow down the process, and to make each frame mean something. I also wanted to make it about meeting people, for each photo to become an interaction.��

Speaking of Interactions, Photos of People Are Great

These days, Hawkeye is doing a lot of images of the people that visit our house. He’s making a wall of fame on our refrigerator of all our friends. He's also into photographing his little sister. Everyone likes those photos.

Go Candid

The best moments to try and capture are the ones filled with unbridled joy. When asked to pause and pose, Hawkeye often shifts personality to a more self-conscious, less expressive version of himself, a mask of sorts. I try to catch him without his self-reflective mask.

Some photos just remind me of the best parts of trips: seeing Hawkeye happy and learning. Those photos are my favorites.��

…And Skip the Selfie

Nope. Not into the selfie. But Hawkeye did want to shoot our Christmas card one year, so I made him a manual, rope-operated contraption to push the button of his camera. It’s the clunkiest self-portrait machine ever and it looked AWESOME.��

The post Aaron and Hawkeye Huey’s Rules for Taking Stellar Photos of Your Kids appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.