Curled up in a fetal ball, whimpering, wondering who’d stolen my clothes….
No, wait. That’s not for public consumption.
Reset…
With regard to when Philly Beer Week should be held, I have, as man of a certain age should, come down in favor of warm rather than cold.
June has its problems, what with graduations, weddings, Little League, yard work and the rare but not impossible appear of the local professional hockey or (really rare) basketball teams in the playoffs of their respective sports, and I think the week chosen was a tad early because at least a few of those issues disappear by mid-month. A week later, or even the last week of the month would work for me. Or go the other direction and set it during the last week of May.
I admit to having been swayed considerably in my final decision when I saw what Scoats wrote, I believe on Facebook, “you can have a blizzard in March.” Yes, I already knew that, but Scoats is a man of wisdom and somehow that struck a chord.
The big arguments for March are two-fold (and major). One is that the first quarter is the most difficult of all for both brewers and publicans and it’s very nice to have ten days of major events to add some cash to the tills. The other is that there is just too damned much going on in June and smaller crowds at a lot of venues this year reflected that. If it is decided to go back to March, I stress again that there is no unbreakable dictum that it needs must be the same week at St. Patrick’s Day. Hold it a week later. Why is this so hard?
Also, as we saw this past year, the likelihood is that there will be a a mini-PBW in March in any case; there should be serious consideration given to making this an even more official part of the overall celebration and that means more than just talking about it during a meeting which was attended by only a few and then issuing press releases claiming provenance.
The one clear truth is, the decision made this year, stay, go back or adjust, has to be final. There’s only one last chance to get it right.
There are many other factors to be considered than my wishes, of course (although in a perfect universe, my wishes would suffice), including what publicans and brewers think and what their experiences have been. And by that, I mean all publicans and brewers, not just the connected few.
I also think there were far too many events competing with one another this past year and more than a few “events” which weren’t events at all. We’ve proven our point many times over that we can do more and have more places to do it than anybody else. Let’s concentrate on making the celebration of “America’s Best Beer-Drinking City” continue to be America’s best beer-drinking experience as well by keeping things reasonable.
Okay, I probably have enough people mad at me now to stop.
Meanwhile—assuming my interminable “Philly Beer Week Reports” series did not send you running from the room screaming “Enough!”—be advised that Mr. Brew Lounge is on Part Two (as of today) of a ten (count ‘em, ten) part magnum opus he is calling Philly Beer Week 2010: Contemplations, Conversations, Ruminations, and an occasional Diatribe. That link takes you to part one; from there you are on your own.
So there you are. You can wallow in PBW just a while longer. Life is good.
Tags: Philly Beer Week by jackc
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I already noted in some post or other that we decided to skip the Dock Street Music Fest (reluctantly) because of the humidity and threat of rain. Consequently we arrived in the city in late afternoon and checked into our hotel at 12th and Walnut. Carl P is, despite what you would think, a stickler about things going right, so discovering that the elevator was broken (we were on the second floor, so no big deal) and the air-conditioning in the room barely functional got him in a bit of a tizzy, but I suspect this was merely the universe wreaking its vengeance on him for unnamed an unspoken sins. As evidence for this, I note that I stayed at the same hotel two nights later for the Monk’s dinner and, while the elevator was still down, the air-conditioning in my room (one door down from the one we’d shared) was so cold I had to sleep under a blanket.