In a subsequently regretted moment of weakness, I acquiesced to chairing a conference a while back. The two compensations for this not-to-be-repeated decision were the fact that the weather in San Diego in July is a big improvement over that in Chicago and the opportunity to explore the San Diego beer scene. For this trip, I was accompanied by the woman I travel with, there to enjoy the former, and a former business associate (who I will call Steve), who had been cajoled into assisting me on the conference caper and who expected to be rewarded with the latter. I made our travel arrangements to arrive the Saturday before the conference started to take advantage of both.

Previous visits having primed me with some intelligence on the San Diego beer scene, I was pleased to discover that our hotel was within walking distance of the Riptide Brewery. The Riptide is a brewpub located virtually across the street from the San Diego Convention Center. It boasts a horseshoe-shaped bar that surrounds the brewing area and both indoor and outdoor seating. The brewery specializes in ales and I was unable to find one that I didn't like. Their porter was excellent, as was the bitter. The brewery has a honey ginger ale, sold as one of their specialties, which seemed to be short of both honey and ginger and was somewhat cloudy to boot, but go figure. A minor shortcoming in an otherwise excellent selection.

The next evening, we checked out the Pacific Beach Brewing Company located in (of course) the Pacific Beach section of San Diego just south of La Jolla. Having spent a dimly remembered evening celebrating my 40th birthday within the confines of Pacific Beach Brewing last year, I was anxious to bring my memory of the place back into focus. The pub clearly caters to the local college crowd and, on the night we were there, had something like a dozen house-brewed ales on tap. Favorites among the selections available were the stout and a nice I.P.A. Roughly half of the beers on tap were fruit or other types of specialty beers. Among these, the peach was perhaps best described by Steve who dubbed it as "silly", the strawberry was unanimously voted by the group (now grown to four with the materialization of the woman I travel with's brother earlier in the afternoon) as "vile", the jalapeno was interesting as the chile was subtle enough to not overpower the beer, but the clear winner of the specialty beers was a chocolate mint stout that was good enough to convince me to try and reproduce it in the privacy of my own kitchen.

My conference duties prevented me from visiting a third brewpub in the area, the San Diego Brewing Co., but I was pleasantly surprised to find, in the course of various schmooz-fests with conferees, most of the local hotel bars carry Anchor beers or Karl Strauss, a hoppy amber ale, on tap.