Wednesday, June 10, 2009

NOS and Boulder beer- Day 2: Part 2

Yesterday was another busy day of lectures and beer pursuits. I recapped a little of it previously. Here is another very brief report. The only reason why I am writing this now is that it is raining outside... again. But, more on that later.

Part 1: The talks
During day two Melanie Sanford gave a fast-moving talk on Pd(II/IV) catalysts. She presented some very interesting work very quickly. Next, Tamio Hayashi talked about Rhodium-catalyzed reactions. I missed some of this because I had to poop. Eric Jacobsen gave a really good presentation on asymmetric hydrogen-bond catalysis. He mentioned a class of H-bond catalysts that are great at the asymmetric part, but they slow the reaction down. This made me wonder how he could call them 'catalysts.' Regardless, it was a wonderful morning of organic chemistry. Later in the evening, Andrew Streiweiser was presented with the Adams Award. He then gave a much more interesting lecture than I expected.

Part 2: The pursuit for beer
In the late afternoon I went out looking for beer. I decided to go to Southern Sun Brewery which is a larger version of the original Moutain Sun. When I got there at 3:50PM I found that it did not open until 4PM. I decided to wait a little while when this happened:

The heavens they opened up and began punishing the world for unknown sins or for my desire to obtain beer, or so it seemed. The hail, it was biblical and it started whitening the ground:

And I was kept from this:
Eventually, I realized I was being a big wimp and so I decided to walk the 30 feet in the rain and get me some beer. And it was very good beer. They only have about 25 beers on tap... I drank the XXX Pale Ale, the Old School Irish stout and Colorado Kind. The Kind was very nice. The Stout was unremarkable. The Pale Ale was an excellent example of the style.

After the poster session (several hours later, mind you), I took a walk to the Mountain Sun Pub and found out why they opened a bigger store. The place was packed with people drinking really, really good beer. I stood in a corner drinking FYIPA, an Amber, and something else I don't remember.

UPDATE: It is 4:09PM Mountain time and I want to go to the Walnut Brewery but am being held hostage by another monsoon. Nice weather, Boulder!

8 comments:

Unknown said...

One of the highlights of my short career was seeing Christina White rip into a very pregnant Melanie Sanford for pretty much no reason (I think she had failed to mention one of Prof. White's catalysts or something during her talk).
Fast-talking, energetic women o' science at its finest.

Anonymous said...

Christina gave a talk last night at the CombiChem GRC - I've been mentally raped...

Lisa-tastrophies said...

Anyone who would let a little rain stand between him and the thing he loves.....
I'm glad you overcame the monsoon and made it to the beer. (Other than that. I didn't understand a word of what was going on at the chem conference.)

milkshake said...

I had the displeasure of being accused by Christina when she was a postdoc, of secretly stealing her chemicals and ideas. I can confirm that she was the anxious shrew that you are describing.

Chemgeek said...

I've never had any interactions with Christina White, but it makes me want to attend a lecture or something by her.

RyanReibey said...

Take your treats home and have a parent or responsible adult inspect them. Don't eat anything that looks suspicious or tampered with.

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