It’s been a couple of weeks since 2019 rolled in and it’s finally time to post the 2018 Bar Charts!
I started keeping track of our bar visits in my Bullet Journal back in October 2017 and converted it to a spreadsheet early in 2018. As the year went on, I used this project as a bit of a playground to hone my Excel and stats skills – sometimes work projects improved the bar chart and sometimes the bar chart taught me something that helped me at work. It’s been a fun and surprising project!
The key info includes:
- “Total Outings” – this is how many times we’ve gone out for a drink, or to a place that serves drinks. If we go to the same place twice in a day, it’s only counted once. Also, we count a day as the hours between waking up and going to bed – so if we’re out past midnight, it counts towards the previous day.
- “Individual Bars” – this is a count of unique bars in a given time period. Because we often go to the same bars repeatedly, I wanted to separate out this number from outings.
- “Busiest Day” – After a few epic bar crawls, I started tracking what day of the month/year we had the highest number of bar visits. This often coincides with trips or USBGMSP events.
- “Busiest Day Total” – How many visits we made on the busiest day.
- “Most Visited Bar” – Pretty self-explanatory really.
- “Busiest City” – It’s almost always home, unless we’ve had a trip that month.
On to the data!!
A few more numbers for which I don’t have fancy charts:
- Of our 366 outings…
- 255, or 70%, were in the Twin Cities metro
- 15, or 4%, were in Outstate Minnesota
- 59, or 16%, were outside of Minnesota but in the United States
- 37, or 10%, were outside of the United States
- Of the 172 unique places we drank…
- 77, or 45%, were in the Twin Cities Metro
- 10, or 6%, were in Outstate Minnesota
- 50, or 29%, were outside of Minnesota but in the United States
- 35, or 20%, were outside of the United States
2018 in Summary
We got to take some amazing trips – San Francisco, New Orleans (overlapping slightly with Tales of the Cocktail!), London, and Paris. We played a lot of “Bar Tag” where the bartender or a patron at one spot would tell us we HAD to check out another, so we did! Also, bars that were in our hotel did very well. Convenience wins!
While at home, we still spent a lot of time at Marvel. Considering we got engaged and legally married there, it will always be our “Winchester.” Despite being a 15-minute-walk away, we didn’t make our first visit to newcomer Hodges Bend until April. Even so, they managed to jump to second place. Republic stays high in the list because they have an amazing beer list and a great happy hour burger.
Being Social Media Coordinator for the USBGMSP impacted my drinking destinations quite a bit. We hosted our annual fundraising competition, Iron Bartender, in October and I did a lot of running around to photograph (and drink) cocktails.
I continue to have a great passion for the hospitality industry both at home and around the world. Very rarely am I heading into a bar or restaurant thinking “I can’t wait to have a drink,” instead it’s usually “I can’t wait to see my friend!” And even in the places we’ve never been or travel to, we seem to make an impression by being kind, respectful, curious, and excited – when we went to the Little Red Door in Paris for the first time, one of the bartenders there remembered us from our visit to Happiness Forgets in London, over a year before!
Here’s to another year of adventuring…and spreadsheets!