And the winner is........

Team Irevna posted a strong performance over the weekend to claim first prize in - not a sports event or a corporate quiz - but a beer drinking competition, sponsored by Kingfisher. The event started on Friday, as we settled down for our usual Friday night post-work drinking session at our regular watering-hole - High Time at GRT Grand Days . When we ordered our first beer, we were approached by some chaps from Kingsfisher informing us about some current promos going on. The deal was - if you completed a jigsaw puzzle in two minutes, you get another pitcher of beer free. And sure enough, we managed to solve the puzzle (not completely, but it was good enough for the Kingfisher chaps) and so it was a pitcher of beer on the house. The Irevna team on Friday consisted of Anish Mathew, Saravanakumar (non-drinking participant), Laxmideepak, Vishnu Balchand, Sunderraman and yours truly.

The above picture sums up our 'can-do' attitude

We are also informed that another part of the promotion was a contest for the maximum draught beer consumed (till the end of Saturday). You get 3 points for a pitcher and 1 point for a mug of draught beer. At the end of the contest, the team with most number of points receives Rs. 5,000 (second place gets Rs. 2,500).

We don't normally need much encouragement to consume vast quantities of beer, but this just spurred us on even further. A couple of hours later, we ended the day on 19 points, trailing the leaders by 1 point.

On Saturday, we knew we didn't have to do much better, especially if the group that was leading on Friday did not show up. We reached the bar at 6 pm after ensuring that there will be atleast 3-4 people to do the glassful. Finally, Team Irevna on Saturday consisted of Anish, Saravanakumar, Santhankrishnan, K. Ramesh and me. Once we got started, we tried calling for further reinforcements, even thought there was no sign of our closest competitors. However, most people we called had better things to do on a Saturday evening. I tried arguing with them to see the lager picture (that's not a typo), but no amount of beer pressure worked. Anyway, none of that was necessary in the end, as we won by the comfortable margin of 37-20 (the chaps from Friday did not even show up). To put this in perspective, that means 12 pitchers and 1 mug (approx. 19.6 litres of beer), over 2 evenings, shared by about 8 people !

We were pretty confident all along, as was one of our regular waiters, who let us know half way through that he had taken a bet that we would win. We walked off with Rs. 5,000 of beer vouchers that could be used on KF draught over the next two months. While cash might have been better, this is nearly as liquid as cash for us (pun intended). Cheers !