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Emily Knapton

Mark6AML37_2025-03-07-06-42-07

All right, we made it to Friday. It's time for Main Street, Connecticut, a chance to showcase our local towns and cities and all they have to offer today we are visiting Norwalk, and that's where we find News 12 Connecticut's Mark Sudall, uh, joining us a big do is coming up in Norwalk, Mark. That's right, Becky. The Norwalk St. Patrick's Day parade is coming up tomorrow morning at 11 o'clock. We are at O'Neill's right now in downtown Norwalk as we get ready for the parade. And to talk more about the parade with us is Jason Grady from the Norwalk Police Emerald Society. Thank you so much for being with us this morning. Thanks for having me. So tell us about the parade. What's what's the route going to be? Let's start with that. So tomorrow morning 11 o'clock we step off from Veterans Park. We march across the drawbridge up Washington Street, make a right onto North Main Street here and then up right here at O'Neill's in our Guinness tent for our post parade celebration. And festivities. It'll be a great day for family and friends, so we hope that everybody comes down and hangs out with us. So I think this is like the 8th or 9th parade, of course we missed a year or two there with COVID, obviously. Uh, what are some of the, uh, participants gonna be? Any floats, bands, I imagine? Yes, yes, we have, um, pipe and drum bands. We have Irish step dancers, we have a couple of nice floats, some local businesses that were most generous and sponsored us are coming to join us today. It's really fun for the whole family. We have all sorts of, uh, lively music and dancing. It should be a great day. Now I, I'm sure that the planning is insane. How long does it take to put all this together? Yes, yeah, the planning is, is, is quite a bit. We're lucky to have some great help with, with Ollie and Donnie from here from O'Neill's and and some of our brothers and sisters in fire and EMS. Um, the city of Newark has been great to us. They help us out so much. Department of Public Works, if you guys come down, you see the nice shamrocks painted on the sidewalk, you know, so we, we start planning about 3 months ago. Um, we put on a couple of nice fundraising get-togethers to ramp up for the season. So yeah, it's quite a bit, but it's all for the city, it's all for this great event. So what does it do for the local businesses? Uh, local businesses, especially in the downtown area, see an increase in volume on, on parade day, obviously, but we really try to push local community support. So most of our, our biggest sponsors with the exception of Guinness, uh, are local places that want to help grow Norwalk, especially downtown. Awesome. Jason, thank you so much, Becky, we'll be back here in our next hour. All right, look forward to that, Mark. Thank you.

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Mark7AML37_2025-03-07-07-30-42

All right, we made it to Friday time for Main Street, Connecticut, a chance to showcase our local towns and cities and all they have to offer today we're in the city of Norwalk. That's where we find News 2 Connecticut's Mark Sudall with a lot going on in Norwalk this weekend, Mark. There sure is, Becky. Yeah, we are at O'Neal's just down the road from the Sono collection. This place is going to be packed tomorrow for the St. Patrick's Day parade tomorrow morning at 11 here in Norwalk. Ollie O'Neill is joining us this morning. Thank you so much. Thanks for being here and we're going to get a little lesson here on the art of pouring a Guinness. While we're talking, I'm going to start, yes, exactly, takes a perfect pint of Guinness. We're. Certified, perfect pints certified here in O'Neills, so. We sell quite a bit of this and we expect to sell quite a few tomorrow. So while we're chatting, this is going to take about 90 seconds to settle this. You can see the cascade. Yes, you're quite of a seller of Guinness. We do, yeah, we sell more Guinness than any other establishment in Connecticut, so yeah, for the last couple of years, and I think it's because we take great pride in pouring, you know, pouring it perfectly. So there's a lot of science. What is the trick about it? There is a lot of science that goes into. You know, pouring the perfect pin between storing it at the correct temperature, we have a blender for to have the right blend of gas, nitrogen and carbon dioxide, and then keeping the keeping the lines clean, glassware clean and going through the correct steps, you know, pouring it to it's a two step pour and it just tastes delicious. Our customers love it. And where do you stand in terms of the country? Um, so last I heard a couple of years ago we were like in the top 20 you know, so yeah, for a little little Irish pub in Norwalk, Connecticut, yeah, we do, we do pretty good. That is amazing. Yeah. And now all your kegs are downstairs. Yeah, we have a cellar. That's another reason why our Guinness is so good. Our cellar is directly underneath us here, so it's a short distance from the keg to the tap to the glass. And now how many kegs you gonna go through? We've got a lot that we're lucky we've got a lot of storage room downstairs, but right now, you know, we were, we were a little nervous. Donny, my partner, he was a little nervous that they might run out, so he, he ordered in like an additional 100 kegs to get us through the next couple of weeks. So break this all down for us. Like how much will you get out of a keg and we can maybe. I don't know if I can do the math right, you know, our whole account history, but we have, uh, there's 88 Imperial pints. These are 20 ounce pints in each keg, and, uh, yeah, we hope that we'll be able to blow through 120 kegs or so in the next, you know, in this whole Saint Patrick's season. Yeah, let's just say that's a lot of pints. That's a lot of pints of pints. People and a lot of staff, great staff to help pour them, and it starts really tomorrow with the parade, you know, so the parade kind of ends right back here at Pine Street and we have a little post parade ceremony outside in the tent and in the 30 seconds we have left, really Guinness is kind of a happy accident, isn't it? huh? It is. I guess it was the uh as the story goes, the uh barley was roasted by accident and then they went ahead and uh came up with this wonderful, right? They burnt it. Yeah, that's where it gets its color, right? That's for you. You're supposed to wait, but I know we're short on time. I apologize. I'm not doing this the right way, but, uh, it is, so it's, right? It's Friday. Oh, and Mark, by the way, oh, look at you. That's 10,565 pints. 10,500. You're doing the math, Becky. I didn't trust me. 500 pints. That's what she said. Wow, thanks. We'll see you guys have it could be a lot of, a lot of fun with the parade. Thank you.

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News 12 is checking out where to go in Norwalk for St. Patrick's Day.

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