I’m sitting here and I’m trying to come up with an interesting and insightful way to plug The Brewer’s Plate.

I mean, you could go with “It’s one of the premiere events of the Toronto beer scene!” or “It just keeps getting bigger and better!” or “I know $125.00 seems like a bit of a spend, but it’s a better value than last year since there’s even more stuff!” or “They support a marvelous charity called Not Far From The Tree that you should look at!” or “Jamie Kennedy’s going to be there, and he’s a pretty nice guy” or “Hey, wanna learn about beer and food?! This is the place to do it!”

Any or all of these things would be accurate things to say about it. I could plug previous editions that I’ve written about, like the one from two years ago at the Wychwood Artscape Barns. That was a nice day, except for the rather startling man on stilts trying to navigate through an increasingly compact throng.

But the truth is that just about everyone has already done it.  I was asked if I’d get the word out about the event, and unfortunately, I just couldn’t figure out a way to make it play nationally in the newspaper, because I suspect there’s nothing worse than reading about an event you really want to go to in another province that you can’t possibly get to. I mean, there’s some disgruntled foodie in Edmonton who’s looking at that if it’s an article and thinking “Curse your eyes, Jordan St. Whatsit, you slightly tipsy scribbler! This is not relevant to my interests in an immediate way although possibly we could steal the idea!”

I mean, I can’t even give it the Craft Beer Advent Calendar treatment with the bad doggerel. What am I going to do, rhyme it in Homeric couplets? It would be a challenge to try that with some of the chefs’ last names. Karen Vaz for instance could only merit Hudibrastic poetry given that she works at the Rebel House (and even then only if you’re a cockney). There was a brief appeal in that Barbara Frum and Atrium seem like a natural.

The brewer’s plate is going to be excellent. I don’t know exactly what the highlights are going to be. There are celebrity chefs in addition to the regular chefs this year.  There are more regular chefs than there were last year! One of them is Howard Dubrovsky, who cooked what was possibly the best beer and food pairing event I’ve ever been to! His seafood chowder was so good I considered offering him an involuntary unpaid internship at St.John’s Wort.

There’s so much stuff that you’ll never get through all of it. There’s just no chance. You could be three people and you’d still never manage it. There’s a silent auction! You might win stuff! It’s going to be exciting. There’s going to be music and people and entertainment and slightly drunken revelry and people are going to have a really, really good time.

So buy a ticket already and send a shirt to the dry cleaners. It’s going to be awesome!