Free ThinkFest Tickets: And The Winner(s) Is (Are)…

I agree that there are not enough tiki bars in this town (or this country, or this world), but demanding more is not a Big Idea. Farm to table cocktails? No matter what you call them, I’m still going to want to drink a beer and a shot 9 times out of every 10 times I find myself on the happy side of the long oak. Turning the entire Piazza at Schmidt’s into one enormous ice luge shot bar? It’s definitely a big idea, but…

We had a fair amount of brainpower poured into this final round of our little win-free-tickets-to-ThinkFest game. Some ideas were good. Some ideas were…not (seriously, frozen beer foam DOES NOT TASTE GOOD. I don’t care what they do in Japan). But in the end, there could be only one.

And that one was Jenny. This was her idea:

We have great home brewers in Philadelphia. It would be interesting and cool if restaurants could create partnerships with home brewers to create menu specific or season specific small batch beers and be able to sell them. It would be a smaller version of the collaborations already happening between breweries and restaurants.

Seems so small and so simple, doesn’t it? And yet, this could be the kind of thing that sets off a chain-reaction of restaurateurs supporting small-time craft brewers and neighbors supporting restaurateurs. All of those talented nano-breweries out there would have an outlet for their truly spectacular product. The best of them might even end up doing house beers for individual restaurants. And in a BYO environment where houses can just give the stuff away, paired with a lovely meal, and thereby avoid all labeling concerns and other entanglements? We’re actually kinda surprised that more people aren’t doing this already.

Okay, so Jenny wins the pair of tickets to this weekend’s ThinkFest. Nicely done.

Except…

See, my problem with Jenny’s idea was that it was a very sober and well-thought-out answer to a question about drinking in Philadelphia–an activity which is the antithesis of sobriety and very rarely well-thought-out. Thus, I also wanted to reward someone whose thinking fell a little bit more on the crazy side of the street.

I really liked Gregg‘s idea for the augmented reality app that would allow me to photograph my friends pounding shots with Estelle Getty and Nikola Tesla. DM‘s suggestion that we forgo the notion of bars entirely and just give everyone their own mini-fridge stocked with booze whenever they go out was inspired. But the one that really got me excited was Alexander Kacala, whose ideas about alcoholic slushies and infused vodkas were weak, but totally won me over with his suggestion of drunks-only bumper cars. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a winning idea. Imagine it at Xfinity Live on any Friday night. At Barcade. Hell, at Frankford Hall or Le Bec Fin. Art and I have spent most of an afternoon discussing the possibilities of this, and we have only one real suggestion to make it better.

Forget the bumper cars. Make it drunken go-cart racing.

You’re welcome, world.

And Alexander, we’ll see you at ThinkFest on Saturday.

ThinkFest [Official]