Sunday, May 23, 2010

Happy Monday, It's a PBW update-Hear ye, Read all about it, Now Get Planning

Welcome back to your desk job and to this, your Monday Morning Productivity Killer. Though, to be fair, everyone defines productive just a little bit differently. The official calendar over at Philly Beer Week's website is reportedly "locked." However, I wouldn't rule out last minute changes. I'll keep an eye on it, but I'm releasing this latest update to you with the anticipation that it won't change much. I'm looking to lock down my own schedule. It's a busy time of year, but I'll look to squeeze as much in as possible, though it certainly will be less than in each of the last two years. I'm going to continue to point you over to the original page where the link to the spreadsheet is contained. I've rearranged a couple of the columns. Also, I've completed reseeded the spreadsheet. We're now up to 10 printed pages. Over the past week, there have been enough additions, deletions, changes/edits that it was just easier to do a fresh load of the calendar. Hopefully, this doesn't screw too many of you up...those of you that have been planning for a couple of weeks now. So, go get it. Take some time...focus...Check it out. Maybe look at just one day at a time...narrow it down Free/PAYG versus big ticket items....city versus suburbs...day versus evening versus late night...everyone has their own method. ===>And now there's a Google Calendar to go along with it, courtesy of Jake Ludwinski at BeerValley.com As you peruse, you may find interesting things along the way as did I. You may even give out some preliminary awards, as also did I. For your enjoyment...or, if for nothing else, to continue the erosion of your Monday Morning Productivity. Your boss can thank me later, preferably with a beer at a PBW event. Best and Longest Event Names (plus a gratuitous nod to profanity for good measure): Fergie's Best well-deserved Dig against the PLCB: Memphis Taproom's Brunch Best non-brewer to have an event named in his honor: Sparks Most ambiguous event name: British Invasion....paired with a blank description, this is not a good way for me to reconsider my years-long personal boycott of Elephant & Castle Worst non-textbook Marketing: any of the roughly 50 "events" that have very little to the name and absolutely no description. In amongst almost 900 events, I'm not even giving a sideways glance to these while looking down the list...fact is, they get lost for lack of any details. Worst example of proofreading: perhaps I'm nitpicking, but sixtle is spelled sixtel...Oscar is Oskar...and not only is Franzeskanner, Franziskaner...but heffe is hefe...and Tria is located in PA, not NY (oops, nevermind, I see that's now been fixed) Most represented brewery: I didn't scientifically count each occurrence of an event for these guys, but I saw a heck of a lot of Sierra, Victory, and Voodoo on the calendar. The "what's up with Afternoon Delight?"award: Don't know if there was any coordination to these events, but I seemed to notice a handful, or so, of events named along the lines of "...Afternoon Delight..." Don't know what it means, but if it's an inside secret, maybe someone will let me in on it. The older but wiser award: Lord Chesterfield better have taken his meds, 'cause this guy is putting in some serious time during PBW. The We Try Harder award: Can't wait to see how all of these brewers and reps are going to cover all of these bars over all of these days. Better be a reliable car service...it's an amazingly staggering lineup of events for these folks to cover in 10 days. Name that Target Market award: Delilah's, Le Bec Fin, Four Seasons, Jose Garces...maybe the traditional hard core beer geek crowd is considered played out. This year, more than ever, "non-traditional venues" are hosting beer events. If it's part of a year-round education and foray into better beer, then it's probably a good thing. Biggest unanswered question: How will a June-based PBW go over with the masses? I'm going into it cautiously optimistic, but I've heard from numerous who have already mentioned that their available time for PBW this year is going to be reduced simply because of too many other commitments at this busy time of year. We shall see. Any observations from the calendar that you'd like to share?

4 comments:

Jake said...

There are total of 3 different ways you can slice, dice and plan your Philly Beer Week at beercalendar.org:

1. Google Calendar
2. Plain text list
3. Google List View (sortable by all fields)

enjoy!
jake

Bronwen said...

Answer to my prayers!

Anonymous said...

afternoon delight= afternoon sex... was an old song i think the mamas and the papas

Bryan Kolesar said...

yeah, anonymous, I got that part. I just had a tough time figuring why multiple venues were hosting events with very similar names...didn't know if there was some connection