Day 6: The Final Day in Washington DC

By Greg B. Well, the final day in Washington DC for the neuroscience conference was upon us.  Packing up from the hotel and dreading the fact that we would need to drag our luggage around the conference or stash it somewhere was an annoying factor, not to mention the day of posters, followed by the commute back home as an anticipated future burden.  Fortunately, however, Old Dominion came to the rescue.

I drank my first Old Dominion Oak Barrel stout in the summer of 2005.  I was a young lad, just out of college, broke and working constantly in a lab all summer running behavioral experiments.  But I did manage to get out for a few beers occasionally (and I do mean occasionally… I probably should have said rarely).  Anyway, I went to One Eyed Mike’s, which was right across the street, one of the places on this planet that sells the most Grand Marnier.  I ordered an Oak barrel stout and instantly fell in love with the delicious creamy texture and interesting malt character.  Though I do have to say this occurred several years ago, and I have not been able to find this beer around town very often, it is a rare treat when you do find it and I recommend this very strongly.

The DC Convention center actually has an Old Dominion pub attached to the north end, so if you walk outside of the conference center over to 9th and head north, you’ll see it as one of the northern-most parts of the building.  Walk inside, it looks like any normal pub.  TVs showing various professional or college sports, maybe a few with the news. We decided to go here for lunch because it was close, since Gabi had her poster session that afternoon at 1pm.  Also, my friend Amanda was with us, down to DC for one last hurrah of science conference.  We got a booth and were promptly greeted by our cute waitress, Anastasia.  I have to say, all cuteness aside, she was possibly the best waitress I had encountered this entire trip.  She was always checking on us at the right time for refills, new beers, food, etc, always smiling and also willing to engage in short conversation.  Definitely a nice change from the usual forced-smile grumpy robot servers that abound.  We started by ordering a round of the Old Dominion winter Ale.  This was a great beer and is their seasonal brew.  Has a very rich, creamy head, great retention, very creamy looking with fine bubbles and beautiful lacing on the glass.  It was very dark brown in color, more of a brown/reddish tint to it.  Tastes a little like chocolate-toffee, which is interesting because on the nose it had a slight hoppy smell to it that you could get over the malts.  This even with it being a very malty brew, and it hid whatever alcohol was in the beer very well.

For lunch, I ordered the Cool Wasabi Turkey BLT wrap, Gabi ordered some chicken tenders (she had to eat and run), and Amanda ordered a Caesar salad.  The Turkey wrap came with waffle fries, which were delicious!  One again, a restaurant in DC cooked fries right, crispy on the outside, more mushy on the inside.  These were delicious, and I rapidly devoured the whole bunch of them.  Next I tasted the cool wasabi turkey wrap.  Man was this good!  I don’t know how they did it, but they were right… the wasabi lacked any of the intense ‘heat’ sensation you get, it was cool and refreshing but had a definite wasabi flavor.  The tortilla was great, the amount of ingredients in the wrap were diced small enough to make eating them very easy and efficient and without too much mess.  Great job, Old Dominion!  Gabi’s chicken tenders were good as well.  Not too much breading, more of a crispy ‘tempure’ style batter than the overwhelming breaded chicken tenders (I hate this kind).  Amanda’s salad looked good, and even came with two big slices of garlic bread with some other spice (oregano?) sprinkled on top.  All around, I think we all can say this was a great lunch spot.

However, the main reason I came here was to try more of Old Dominion’s beer.  Unfortunately, they were out of their Oak Barrel Stout at the moment, so I decided to try a sampler of their beers.  From the menu, I picked their Victory Ale, their Lager and their Ale, and let Anastasia recommend the next beer.  She did not disappoint, she choose the Millennium, their barley wine brew.  When the sampler came, I was presented with somewhere in the ballpark of 4-6oz of each of these beers.

• Old Dominion Lager - Gold/straw colored, nice carbonation with a medium lacing on the head.  Smelled a tad like Saaz hops, or that style of hop character.  It was not really as carbonated as I suspected but it did have a nice malty flavor and texture.
• Old Dominion Ale - Dark Amber color, nice creamy head and wide lacing on the glass.  This was sweeter than the Lager, and even a bit more citrusy.
• Old Dominion Victory Amber - Very fine lacing on the bottle, dark honey colored beer.  Tasted lighter than the previous two, a little more thin on the mouth and sweeter than the lager, but with a slight crisp bitter aftertaste.  Very nice!
• Old Dominion Millennium - Wow.  Incredible head that just coats the glass with foam.  Thick honey translucent color to the beer.  On the taste, amazing, honey, citrus then a bitter flavor all hit you, 1,2,3 as you sip and drink the beer.  Strong, bold beer that hides it’s higher alcohol (11% abv I think) well.  If you like bee honey with strong flavors, like buckwheat and wildflower style, then this will be a nice winter beer for you to try.  They classify it as a barleywine, which makes sense given the flavors, but it is really a quite nice beverage.

So, at this time I had been telling Amanda some things about beer, how it’s made, how it works, and she had questions.  Her main question of “what are hops, and what do they taste/smell like” needed to be answered, so I ordered a second sampler, this time with two IPAs from different breweries, to give her an idea.

• Redhook Longhammer IPA - A nicely hopped beer with good aromatics and a good clean bitter taste.  This was actually a nice beer to show Amanda a thing or two about hops.
• Stone IPA - A very well hopped beer.  Has a bit more complex hop aroma on the nose, compared to the Redhook IPA, though I think they just probably used a few different varieties of hops to get this complexity.  It is a nice IPA though, has a good bitter but refreshing taste and a nice head.
• Old Dominion Aviator Amber - This was a good mildly malted beer with a nice balance of hops.  This did not jump out at me as anything extremely unique but it did jump out at me as something that is very drinkable and enjoyable.
• Old Dominion Winter Ale - Yes, I had this again.  I wanted to make sure, when showing Amanda about hops, that she got something malty at the far end of the other spectrum to compare it too.  Great beer, once again!

So, at the end of the day, it turned out that Amanda did not like the bitter flavor give by the hops.  Now, I should say there are other IPAs she can try that are dry hopped and may lack the bitter flavor and have a sweeter hoppy aroma (my Mother’s Milk IPA, perhaps!) but I’m glad she gave it some time to try and see what she liked.

I neglected to each her how to pour a beer

So, after leaving this bar for lunch and going to the conference, meeting friends and seeing posters for a few hours, we met up and decided to head back for a beer and dinner while we waited for rush hour traffic to subside. Also, to celebrate the successful end of another SFN, we decided to get a beer tower.  Yes, a beer tower.  This is 133oz (3L, for you Europeans out there who read this, if any of you do!) of beer, in a large cylindrical tower, with a spigot at the bottom.  Apparently there is a 2 person minimum to order this amount of beer, but you can probably just order two consecutively, and it would be alright.

Science posters on the left, beer on the right.

We decided to try the Winter Ale again, but in the beer tower form.  Our waitress was very pleased by our suggestions, though she did recommend us just buying a few pints, since it was happy hour and we would save some money for the same volume of beer.   We eventually convinced her that we really just wanted to try the tower, since it is kind of an interesting spectacle.  We ordered it, and it came.  Along with a delicious plate of chili cheese waffle fries that Mihyun ordered.  These were delicious, and great pub food!  But the beer tower was really what stole the show.  It is quite a scene to have two small girls plus me at a table drinking beer through smaller, 8oz glasses from a giant, 133oz tower.  I did have to give the girls a few lessons on pouring technique though.

In the end, we finished the tower with ease.  The beer went down well, we cheers-ed to another successful SFN conference, packed up and took the metro to the bus to the car.   Our DC excursion was over, but I think we got a chance to see a lot of what DC has to offer in a relatively short time.  This is a fun city, overall I think there is good beer here (be prepared to pay $6 a beer), the people are friendly (people will give you directions if you look lost) and the traffic will actually stop for you in the crosswalk (something Baltimore drivers could learn).  I’m glad to be back in Baltimore, even if it is for a short time before the holidays, but it was good to get out and see more local cities.  If you have any updates and experiences with these restaurants (or even others), I’d love to hear them, feel free to comment and I will try to get down to DC to check them out!