Get your damned Philly Beer Week on!

I've been pretty quiet about Philly Beer Week -- hell, I've been pretty quiet -- but there's still time for me to give you some very useful advice.

First, if you've got an iPhone, there is -- forgive me -- an app for that. And a pretty damned good one, based on the limited testing I've been able to do since downloading it last night (it was down for a bit, but is back up now, and solid). You can tell it to find you the nearest event to your current location, or the next event to take place (and you can filter by type of event!), or a list of events by neighborhood/area, or by day (a LONG list for each day!). You can also search by venue (12 Steps Down, for instance, is doing a number of events: I didn't know that!) in alpha order or grouped by neighborhood, or by brewery (very nice if you're following Frank Boon or the Trogner Brothers around). There's a Philly Beer Week Twitter feed on the front page, you can select a list of favorite events that you want to get to that will be saved for you on the front page, there's even a Stanley Cup playoff calendar. What else could you ask for! Well...I'd like to be able to filter for pay-as-you-go events; they're the best for loose scheduled drop-in stuff, although there are so many of them that might not be such an advantage. And...it would have been nice to have a map that tracked the path of the Hammer of Glory on Friday, with times and events picked out. Next year.

If you don't have an iPhone? You're covered! My Philly Beer Week allows you to scan the whole calendar of events, pick out what you want, and either print a list, print a Google map with all your events, or download it to Outlook or iCal on your mobile device of choice. Again, you can search the list by a variety of parameters to find what you're looking for.

And if you just don't give a damn about all this technical crap (and if that's you, what are you doing reading a blog?), you can pick up today's Philadelphia Weekly to get the huge printed supplement with all this jazz on good old newsprint. That's nice, too.

Hope to see you at my event at the Grey Lodge Sunday afternoon, and I hope to see plenty of you out and about this week. If you see me, say hi!