The beer bowl

It is estimated that around 130 to 140 million people will tune into some portion of the Super Bowl  on Feb. 1. A conservative guess puts one quarter of the U.S. population in front of the TV that day. The question is not whether you’re watching the game but rather where you’ll be watching the game.
If you’re hosting a party at your house, you’re responsible for the booze, food and TV. Instead of getting a couple of cases of Budweiser and chilling them down in your bathtub, you could contact Broadway Market and order up a pony keg. They need to know the Wednesday before the weekend and if you plan ahead, they have a selection of over 200 kegs to choose from at reasonable prices. Keep them in mind for your next party.
Assuming that you failed to plan until the last minute, you could serve a party punch. Here’s a punch recipe so easy a lineman can make it: In a giant punch bowl upend a half-gallon of lemon or lime sherbet and add to it two liters of ginger ale or 7Up. Next add a pint of Southern Comfort or flavored vodka such as the St. Helena-produced Charbay Meyer lemon vodka. That’s it. The sherbet will keep the punch chilly for the first half of the game. For the record, the ginger ale is better with bourbon and the 7Up is better with vodka. This punch is great without the booze if children are present.
Other than the finger foods, which aren’t really my field of expertise, be sure you have a TV that is showing the game in high-definition. This isn’t the 1970s, so there’s no reason to watch the game on a regular TV or (gasp) in black and white. High-definition is beautiful and enhances the viewing of the game. If no one you know has an HDTV, it is time to move your party to one of Sonoma’s local bars. Since this column is about bartending and bar culture in general, I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t recommend watching the game at a bar.
Most bars turn off the jukebox for the big game and feature it on multiple HDTVs. If you get there early enough, you can grab a table with a superb view of the action. Fans of either team tend to gather in the same spot at the bar, providing a great atmosphere – similar to being at the game but without the brutal expense. Tickets for the game on StubHub.com were averaging around $1,800 per seat for the nosebleed sections. When you factor in lodging, food, and airline tickets for you and a friend, you could either attend the game or buy a new car. The upper-end tickets in a luxury suite are going for a cool quarter-million dollars.
The casual viewer at a bar can deduce what’s going on by the gleeful shouts or despondent sighs from one side of the bar or the other and still keep an eye on the new advertisements and halftime show. Ads are running about $3 million for 30 seconds, so they tend to be pretty spectacular. While watching the game at a bar, you have the option of switching seats if the guy next to you is the boor who likes to prove he knows more than the game commentators by yelling out stats that can’t be proved, or bore you with stories about his Pop Warner days. If you’re this guy, I recommend watching the game at home. Everyone else should see it at a bar where the atmosphere is electric and you don’t have to clean up after yourself. That’s my job.