Greer Relief > 2006 Wing Fling : The Upstate's ONLY Chicken Wing Contest

Great new wing event coming on November 9th in Greer, SC. This is a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone - all you can eat wings and a fundraiser for a great cause! They already have 12 participating restaurants signed up that will be cooking up their own local delights.

There will be live music and all of the typical wing-contest events...

If you live in or even near South Carolina be sure to head down for this event at 6:00 PM on November 9th.

Peace, love, and grease!

Scott "The Cluckbucket" Roth

Cluckbucket: Original Anchor Bar Wing Sauces

We just recently completed our official review of the wing sauces from the original home of the buffalo wing, The Anchor Bar and Grill. Read the full review at the link above.

How to judge a wing.

By Steve "The Vanilla Cluckilla" Roth

As co-founder of the cluckbucket as well as a certified KCBS (Kansas City Barbeque Society) trained and certified judge, I am more than qualified to help. There are three main criteria when judging a buffalo, or hot wing:

Using a scale of 1-5 "drummies", wings are judged for the following:

1. Appearance - this should be the easiest to judge. Does it look appetizing? A wing should not be negatively judged because of personal preference. Meaning, if you don't like breaded wings, but that's what that restaurant serves, they shouldn't be downgraded. You may not go back because of that, but it doesn't make them a bad wing. Wings should be crisp, but not look like fried chicken either. Wings should have sauce on them - buffalo wing sauce should have an orange-ish tint to it. Also, whether the restaurant serves just wings, just drummies, or just the wing attached to the drummy should be noted, but shouldn't change your scoring. However, if you are served a combination of wings and drummies, there should be fairly equal portions of both. A batch with 15 wings and 5 drummies may be downgraded on all three categories. Size of the wings also comes into play here - they don't need to be "wings on steroids", but they should be good-sized. A good rule of thumb is a bit smaller than a standard business card in both length and width.

2. Texture/Tenderness - this should also be fairly easy to judge. Wings should be crispy on the outside, and juicy on the inside. That is the whole point of frying a wing. Whether they are naked or breaded should not matter, but you need to look for different things depending on which. With naked wings, often times the skin is rubbery - this should be a downgrade. Also, with naked wings, often times the wing sauce falls off, pooling at the bottom of the plate or bowl. Some sauce loss is expected, but there should still be a fair amount of sauce on the wings. For breaded wings, the breading will absorb the sauce. If a breaded wing is dry, it is either severely overcooked, or not enough sauce, or both. This is a downgrade. Bone breakage also comes into play here - bones should not be broken. The two wing bones can be torn apart at the ends by the judges, but no bones should be broken in the middle. One in a batch is ok - more than that and you can start to downgrade.

3. Taste - this is the most subjective. Heat should only be a qualifier if they are significantly hotter or milder than advertised. Assuming you are a person of normal taste heat tolerance, and you order mild wings and you have to drink five glasses of water just to get the wings down, that can be a downgrade. Same goes if you order hot and can barely taste the hot. But if you order atomic wings and can't get through them because of the heat, you can't downgrade them. Butter can come into play here as well. Usually that is what is used to lessen the heat of hot sauce or Tabasco. But too much butter is a no-no. If you can taste the butter, it's too much. Butter should be used to lessen the heat, not remove it's flavor (unless of course you ordered butter-flavored wings). DO NOT USE RANCH OR BLUE CHEESE WHEN JUDGING A WING! Once you're done judging, feel free to eat as many wings with either condiment, but while judging, just the wings. You may use some celery to try to remove the taste between each wing, or saltine crackers, or water. Try to stay away from other beverages during the judging process. While the actual chicken meat under the skin shouldn't have much taste besides chicken, it should compliment the flavor of the hot sauce. After that, it is up to your own personal taste!

Each of the three categories should have a weighting. Appearance should be weighted as .10, Texture/Tenderness as .40 and Taste as .50. Thus, a wing that had an appearance score of 3, a T/T of 4, and a Taste as 5 would be judged a 4.40. The formula works like this - (3 x .10) + (4 x. 40) + (5 x .50) = 4.40.

My team of trusty wing enthusiasts made our way out to the new Buffalo Wild Wings (BW3) this past Friday and I've finally gotten around to posting my review. The high-level takeaway is that they have pretty good sauces and the setting is a really large sports bar with tons of flat panel and projection TVs. Unfortuantely, that's were all of the positive things end. Their pricing is completely out of wack because the size of their wings are so terribly small - on an ordinary day 50 wings cost $30 and won't even fill four people.

Outside of perhaps a big game or a Tueday night ($.40 wings), you probably won't be finding me at the new BW3. Fire On the Mountain is still the place for me...

See the full review at the link below:
Cluckbucket: Internet Hot Wing Database Results

Charlotte Observer 09/01/2006 Buffalo Wings creators bringing taste to Charlotte

The Anchor Bar has determined where the locations will be for it's first forray into the franchise restaurant business: Charlotte and Concord, NC. The first location will open up early next year and will mark the beginning of the Anchor Bar's slow but steady march towards even further domination of the wing world. Not only did they invent the wing, but now they are taking their/bar concept on the road to share the wing-love with millions of Americans that can't make it up to Buffalo. Much more to come...

National Buffalo Wing Festival

Greetings Friends of the Cluckbucket-

I'm sorry if you've recieved this more than once (or didn't want to recieve it at all), but I'm trying to get the word out as quickly as possible.

In an act of shameless self-promotion I'm asking for a couple of minutes of your time and your help. You see, I'm trying to become a member of the inaugural National Buffalo Wing Hall of Fame. They will be announcing the members next weekend during the National Buffalo Wing Festival in Buffalo, NY so you’ve only got a limited amount of time to cast your vote.

Please visit the following web page:

http://www.buffalowing.com/hof.php

And nominate me, Scott “The Cluckbucket” Roth and let them know what a swell guy you think I am (or at least make something up) and how cool you think Cluckbucket.com is.

But don’t stop there, please forward this message on to all of your wing loving friends so that they can cast their votes as well…

Thank you in advance for all of your support.

Peace, love, and grease!

Scott “The Cluckbucket” Roth

Buffalo Wild Wings(R) Announces Seven Franchise Area Development Agreements - Agreements signed for 34 franchised units

Here's another article that says 10 locations for Portland.

BW3 Coming to Portland in a Big Way

New restaurant winging its way to Portland - The Portland Business Journal:

The business journal today had an article stating that Buffalo Wild Wings has signed on to open up 10 Portland area locations. Can it possibly be? 10? I knew they were opening up one location at Streets of Tannasborne in Hillsboro, but 10? Wow!

I'll try to do some digging to see if this could possibly be true. Stay tuned.

Oh, just as an FYI, the Streets of Tannasborne location will have their grand opening at 11:00 AM on Labor Day, Monday, September 4th.

Mixed emotions...

With the end of another softball season comes my annual trek to Hooters of Beaverton (Oregon) and this year I'm typing with mixed emotions. I've become so spoiled with tremendous wings at Fire On the Mountain that I don't have to go to Hoots very often, but that being said, I always do enjoy checking in and seeing how they are doing.

I'll cut to the chase of why I have mixed emotions. You see, the wings last night were really really good, probably the best batch of Hoots wings that I have had in two years. And I think I've learned the trick in ordering, you need to ask for them breaded (or naked), hot, extra wet. The "extra wet" is critical or you are sure to be dissapointed with dried wings that taste more like KFC.

The flip side of my experience was how ridiculously expensive Hooters has gotten. I'm not sure about the other locations across the US, but in Oregon the going rate for 50 wings is, get this, $29. $29 stinkin' dollars! You've got to be kidding me. I'm no math genious, but even I can figure out that that is a rip off. $.58 a wing when ordering in quanities of 50 is just absurd. I can remember back to my high school days when 50 wings cost around $10 and then in college they pushed up near $15-20, but $29, give me a break! And to make matters even worse, the frosty cold pitchers of Bud Light that we used to wash down the wings cost were $12. Ouch!

To wrap things up. All-in-all it was a pleasant experience, good wings, good brews, good times, but man, the folks at Hoots must be rollin' in cash. I guess I'll just have to wait till next year to go back... Fire On the Mountain, here I come.

The Cluckbucket wing eating technique "The Smash" was cited by the New York Times on Sunday as an excellent consumption method that will help casual wing eaters become seasoned wing veterans...

The Arsenal - New York Times

Hooters chairman Brooks found dead - Yahoo! News

A mogul of the wing industry has passed away today. Robert Brooks, the chairman of Hooters of America died suddenly over the weekend. While he wasn't the founder of Hooters, he can largely be credited for the firms spreading of the wings. He bought the expansion and franchise rights back in 1984 and the rest is history...

Ummmm... chicken wings...

Cluckbucket: 8th Annual St. Charles County Wing Ding

Another year, and another successful St. Charles County Wing Ding has been wrapped up. As usual, we sent our St. Louis contingent co-owner of Cluckbucket.com, Steve "The Vanilla Gorilla" Roth, and past Cluckbuckie of the Year, Tony "Gome" Frierdich out to cover the event. See their official review:

Cluckbucket: 8th Annual St. Charles County Wing Ding

8th Annual St. Charles County Wing Ding

It's not surprising that they've made it this long, but what is amazing is that we've already come upon the 8th installment of the St. Charles County, MO Wing Ding.

This is a great event featuring the top wing eateries (and other places that serve wings) in the St. Louis area. They've got a sleu of contests going on during the event and the wings are all-you-can-haus.

Go out and support this great cause!

YouTube - Cluck U Chicken 911 Challenge

Nice little documentary of individuals risking their life to knock back some firey wings.

Chicken prices fall, but don't benefit consumers

So you thought the pain at the pump was bad, how about the unnecessary pain that is being felt at the grocery cash register when purchasing chicken? According to this WSJ article, chicken prices are remaining high but the costs are actually quite low right now due to excess supply. Whey the excess supply? Avian flu fears oversees.

Bottom line, protest at grocery stores, wings should be half the price of what they are charging!!!

New video on the Cluckbucket

I just posted my first wing eating technique video to the site. I plan to tape them all in the near future, but for now we're just starting with the Smash. No longer do you have to read the text and visualize the technique in your head.

Check it out at the link below:

Cluckbucket: Chicken Wing Eating Techniques; The Smash

This clip was taped at Fire on the Mountain in Portland, OR, west coast winner of the Cluckbucket.com 2006 Chicken Wing Joint of the Year

Cluckbucket: Chicken Wing Eating Techniques; The Pinch

Hey wing lovers, check out the link above to learn how to perform the latest and greatest wing eating technique, The Pinch. Thanks to wing lover Tom Martini for submitting his favorite move...

Cluckbucket: Chicken Wing Joint of the Year

We've posted our first ever "Wing Joint of the Year" winners, hit the link above to find out who took the crown for 2006!!!

Wingstop Sells 2.5 million Wings on Super Bowl Sunday; Exceeds Predictions - Franchisewire.com

Even more Super Bowl success stories: apparently the Wingstop sold 2.5 million wings across their 260 locations. Earlier they had projected selling 2.2 million so the day was definitely a big success for them.

WLBT 3 - Jackson, MS: Superbowl Sunday Marks A Boom for Local Businesses

Not only was the SuperBowl a huge day for the Cluckbucket and many local wing/pizza joints, but did you know that over 11 million pounds of potato chips were consumed on the big day? This article shows more SuperBowl impact and details how busy a local BW3 was during the day.

ARTICLE: Chicken wings taste test: Bad to the bone (The Virginian-Pilot - HamptonRoads.com/PilotOnline.com)

Here's an interesting little article about a newspaper sponsored wing taste test in Virginia Beach. Nice to hear stories about other lovers of the wing...

Cluckbucket: Chicken Wing Joint of the Year

We just opened up the polls for our first ever Cluckbucket.com Wing Joint of the Year contest. The winner will be determined by 100% by the visitors to Cluckbucket.com and any wing joint in the United States is eligible.

Cast your vote today and be sure to tell all of your friends to nominate their favorite. Please hurry, the polls will close at midnight (pacific time) on Tuesday, March 14th.

Vote Now

Peace, love, and grease!

Scott "The Cluckbucket" Roth
www.cluckbucket.com

Super Bowl Spikes Web Traffic for Cluckbucket.com

Everybody knows that football and chicken wings go together, but what you may not know is how big of an impact the Super Bowl (the football game of all football games) has on the world's top provider of chicken wing recipes, restaurant reviews, and other wing information. Using the online marketing analytics service provided by WebTrends I'm able to share some specific impact on how big of a boost the Super Bowl was for Cluckbucket.com. Here are some figures:

First let's take a look at some trends comparing the week of 1/23-1/29 (a pretty typical week) to the week of 1/30-2/5 (the week leading up to and including the Super Bowl).

• Number of "Unique Visitors" - Increased 142% (from 586 to 1,422)
• Number of "Pages Viewed" - Increased 180% (from 1,661 to 4,647)
• Number of "Visitors who visited more than once" - Increased 120%
• Number of "New Visitors" to the site - Increased 153% (from 522 to 1,325)
• Number of "Returning Visitors" to the site - increased 70% (from 54 to 92)

It's important to note that I didn't do any form of out of the ordinary marketing to new or existing visitors during this timeframe, so it is safe to say that most of the growth listed above is organic based on customer demands, not my proactive demand creation. As you can tell, this week was huge from a standpoint of increasing overall visitors to the site, and even better for attracting valuable new visitors, let's just hope that they found what they were looking for and had a good first impression...

Speaking of what they were looking for, now I'll take a quick look at the week prior to and including the Super Bowl in isolation to share with you a little bit more about who these visitors were, and what they were doing on the Cluckbucket:

• The most popular content on the site was by far the "recipes" area. Overall, the recipe homepage and 12 individual recipe pages on the site were viewed a total of 2,164 times during the week which represents a 230% increase over an ordinary week.
• Getting people down to the point in the site where they view an actual wing recipe is something that I define as a critical conversion event. My site conversion rate for this event for the week was a whopping 53% (786 recipe visits divided by 1,469 overall site visits)
• Wrapping up on the recipes thread, one of the nice things that WebTrends gives me (that I've heard other providers can't do) is some unique breakdowns for specific pages on my site. For example, I've already told you that the recipes area of my site performed well over the Super Bowl, but what I really want to know is additional detail about the recipe home page, http://www.cluckbucket.com/recipes/recipes.htm: WebTrends tells me that this page was viewed 1,319 times, by a total of 512 visits, and 496 individual unique visitors. They also let me know that this page was the entry page for visitors 380 times and that while most people went from this page on to visit actual recipe pages, other visitors to this page were interested in my home page as well as my Internet Hot Wing Database (which are two other key areas of my site).
• Last but certainly not least, I want to know how all of these visitors got to my site in the first place. As you can recall from earlier on, I didn't do any email, paid search engine, or other marketing campaigns during this timeframe so the most likely place to look is traffic from organic/natural search listings. As usual, the big three search engines were responsible for referring the bulk of the traffic throughout the week; Google - 463 visits, Yahoo - 327 visits, and MSN - 312 visits. It's interesting to note that I do a lot better on what I consider core search phrases (like "chicken wings" and "chicken wing recipes") on Yahoo and MSN, but my phrases referred from Google seem to be more sporadic. Overall, "chicken wing recipes" was responsible for sending the most traffic to my site, to a tune of 129 visits (mostly from Yahoo and MSN where I perform in the top 5 listings).

So, I guess looking at the top content that people were hitting and the top search engine referrals all makes sense when I look at it together. Wing recipes are what everybody is looking for to make an solid contribution to their Super Bowl festivities.

Aren't you hungry for some wings now? Check out the Wing Recipes page to make some yourself or to the Internet Hot Wing Database to find a wing-focused restaurant near you!!!

Peace, love, and grease!

Scott "The Cluckbucket" Roth

www.cluckbucket.com

More Wing Bowl Coverage

On a Chicken Wing and a Prayer - Los Angeles Times

More coverage on Wing Bowl. This is a great article that gives some scoop on how Philly can't seem to fill the Wachovia Center for basketball or hockey. Pretty good read.

Chaos in Philly

Philadelphia Inquirer 02/03/2006 Joey Chestnut wins Wing Bowl

Newbie Joey Chestnut used a last round surge (not purge) to edge out the crafty veteran Rich "The Locust" LeFevre in a Wing Bowl of epic proporations this morning. Chestnut, who qualified for the event by chugging a gallon of milk in 42 seconds, not only won, but set a new Wing Bowl record by consuming 173 wings over the 30 minute duration. Chestnut was a steady competititor putting away 83 wings in the first round, finishing the second round with a total of 155 knocked back, and then putting the icing on the cake with an additional 18 wings during the final elimination.

Apparently the scene was as utterly chaotic as usual. Wing Tut was eliminated due to regurgitation, the new Miss Wingette was chosen from a field of 75, and in a moving and emotional ceremony between rounds one and two, Bill "El Wingador" Simmons was inducted into the Wing Hall of Fame. Simmons is by and large the most accomplished Wing Bowl comptetitor of all time, holding five championship crowns.

Here's a blog that covered the event live at the Wachovia Center.

Philly.com 02/02/2006 Wing Bowl odds announced

They just released the vegas odds for tomorrow's event. If "The Locust" that is listed is Rich "The Locust" LeFevre, then he's getting all my money. At 5-1 odds, The Locust is an absolute steal!

Read more about the Locust

View all the competitors

Wing Bowl -- Philly.com

Alas, another Super Bowl is upon us and with that comes an even bigger event for the world of wings, the Wing Bowl. Now in it's 14th year, the annual event at the Wachovia Center in Philadephia (where until last year they had no real reason to watch the Super Bowl and hence invented the Wing Bowl) merges two of my favorite things, competitive eating and of course wings.

This organizers has shifted thing up this year in two big and notable ways. First, they have dubbed this year a "Virgin Wing Bowl" in that no prior participants are allowed to perform in the contest. Apparently they were sick of Sonya Thomas and El Wingador (Bill Simmons) beating up on the rest of the field each year. Second, they are now charging a $5 admission fee instead of the event being free. We'll see how these changes go, the big event is tomorrow morning...

Peace, love, and grease!

Scott "The Cluckbucket" Roth
www.cluckbucket.com