Day 1 - 4C17

Well, it's the first day of the conference and yesterday, the pre-conference day, was very good. Linda Adler-Kasner did a wonderful job managing our time in the EC meeting. With a full agenda, we finished 25 minutes early! And we got a lot of business done, some of which folks will hear about at the Town Hall on Saturday. So if you want to hear about some exciting news about Cs, come to the town hall meeting on Saturday morning!

Charlotte Hogg, Kelly Inoue, and Me

Yesterday ended by going out to dinner with Charlotte Hogg (TCU). Charlotte and I were both MA students together at Oregon State back in the early-mid 90s. We haven't had the good fortune to see much of each other over the years, but we have occasionally been lucky enough to get together. And like the other times, last night was just a wonderful way to end a good day, with an old, good friend. It felt like we never left each other.

We ate at Altabira City Tavern, which is on the 6th floor of the Hotel Eastlund. The food was good, the clam chowder was great, and the beer was so-so. I'm picky when it comes to beer. Their beer list looked good originally, but they were all thin tasting. I tried a flight of four:

The Commons Brewery – Urban Farmhouse Ale
Portland, OR | 5.3% | 32 IBUs | 16 oz     6 

Two Kilts Brewing Company – Scottish Ale
Sherwood, OR | 6.5% | 15 IBUs | 16 oz     6

Zoiglhaus Brewing Company – Zoiglator-Dopplebock
Portland, OR | 7.9% | 23 IBUs | 16 oz     6

Feckin Irish Brewing Company Irish Oatmeal Porter – Nitro
Oregon City, OR | 5.8% ABV | 32 IBUs | 16 oz     6

Anyone who knows me knows that I love Belgian beers and German beers, but they's got to be authentic. So you can imagine that I would be excited to try the farmhouse ale and the dopplebock. The better of the two was the dopplebock, but I was shocked at how thin, and one dimensional both the farmhouse ale and the scottish ale was. All the beers tasted like their brewers had an idea of these kinds of beers that was fixated on one aspect of the beer, and forgot about the complexity of them, the richness of what these beers could have been. Still, I got the dopplebock to drink, and it was drinkable. But the company was much better.

More later.
Peace.