Belmar St. Patrick's Day Parade

Yesterday was the first Belmar St. Patricks Day Parade since COVID changed the world. Here's my open letter to Belmar after the parade.

Shawn Michaels

Dear Belmar,

I have never seen you look so beautiful. The cloudy, rainy skies cleared to uncover a beautiful day and an absolutely incredible and important event. It was so heartwarming to see you and your smiles.

I've been part of the parade for a better part of 30 years, and I'm pretty sure this was the biggest one I have ever seen. Seeing both sides of Main St. full of area residents just made my heart feel good.

But for me, the best part of the day was seeing families outside together, smiling and laughing and enjoying one of the greatest Jersey Shore traditions we have.

And it was especially nice seeing the other half of those smiling faces. You know, the half that's been covered by a mask for way longer than anyone ever anticipated.

And do you know what else was so great to see? All those local businesses thriving on a big day in town. It feels like it's been such a long time. We all know what our local businesses have been through.

And a huge thank you to every single person who helped put the parade together. It's a monumental task to coordinate, and it was executed beautifully. And thank you to all the participants from the firefighters to the students. I was honored to be in the same parade as you.

Here's to hoping that the great momentum from the Belmar/Lake Como St. Patrick's Day Parade will carry over to an amazing, "back to normal" spring and summer for all of us here at the Jersey Shore. It absolutely was a great start.

Thank you for being out there and thank you for your smiling faces!

Shawn Michaels

Our Favorite Was Green Beer At The Parade, But Here Are Each State's Best Beers All Other Days

To find the best beer in each state and Washington D.C., Stacker analyzed January 2020 data from BeerAdvocate, a website that gathers user scores for beer in real-time. BeerAdvocate makes its determinations by compiling consumer ratings for all 50 states and Washington D.C. and applying a weighted rank to each. The weighted rank pulls the beer toward the list's average based on the number of ratings it has and aims to allow lesser-known beers to increase in rank. Only beers with at least 10 rankings to be considered; we took it a step further to only include beers with at least 100 user rankings in our gallery. Keep reading to find out what the best beer is in each of the 50 states and Washington D.C.

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