The Sweet "Science" of Selection

Inside the "War Room" of each HBTG location selection. 

Oh I know you've been dyin' for this one. An exclusive, behind-the-scenes look -- an expose, if you will -- into just how each location for a History By The Glass episode is determined.

It's even dumber and more inane than you could've possibly imagined. But dammit, we're committed to doing this thing in the most ridiculous way possible!

First, my distinguished colleague and I review the list of historic drinking establishments that we've cataloged using the commercial organization tools provided by our friend at Asana. (Asana is not a paid sponsor of this project...but it'd be a lot cooler if they were).

Behold, the organizational glory of Asana! 

Using Asana, we can export all the locations into a spreadsheet so that they can then be cut and pasted into a randomizing program for the final selection stage.

Now, for all our list randomization needs, there's none better than random.com. You see, it's the website that lets you randomize any list you might have. You'll never put names in a hat like some sort of sap again!

It's the Rolls Royce of randomizing websites.

Now at this point you might be asking yourself:

"Hey, morons, why the hell don't you just pick any bar from the list and get on with your lives?!"

I supposed we could do that, yes. But then we wouldn't be able to that really weird thing where we pick the top four randomizer winners and place them in a head-to-head bracket to compete to be the site of our next episode (see "War Room" photo above).

So once the Final Four is selected, we, of course, must have them play a simulated series against each other. Logically, it's best of five in the first round, followed by an often epic best of seven championship series.

So it's back to random.org to essentially do a coin flip to advance the match-up winners. I'd like to tell you we don't cheer wildly when a team rallies from several games down to win a series, but we're emotional human beings not robots. 

Once a team is declared the winner, we'll bring out one last wonderful toy -- the customized Google Map!

That's a lot of bars to visit. 

Due to the number of watering holes we've identified, we'd be using walkers at the end if we only hit one per month. In order to pull this off in decent amount of time -- before the bars or our livers expire -- we've gotta visit two each episode. (Side note: We tried three in episode two and felt it was too much to squeeze in.)

This map allows us to determine the second location for our monthly double-headers. What's nearby or what can we pop by on our way home? This is the only part of the selection process that isn't totally random.

It all takes about 15 minutes (14:30 longer than it should) and then we're ready to make reservations.

Oh not with the bar of course, but with our respective significant others. That's the final and most skillful step. It requires deft perusing of one's calendar and strategic analysis of how best to pitch another night of over-analytical idiocy to one's wife.

Somehow we keep finding a way to put another one on the calendar each moth. Episode V takes place on Friday night with a trip to deep SE PDX.

As always, what could possibli go wrong?