SULPHUR SPRINGS — It’s TED Talks over beer. And wings. And pizza, with a side of science.
It’s Pints of Science, the brainchild of New World Brewery owner Nancy Bird, who fuses short lectures with the casual atmosphere of the music and event space attached to her bar and biergarten. Each month, Bird lines up two or three speakers for 15- to 20-minute talks on subjects ranging from astronomy to mental health, while the audience eats, drinks and, often, laughs.
“Sometimes those in the audience are there to support a friend or family member,” said Bird, a nurse at Tampa General for 37 years before opening the brewery. “But more often than not, people come to hear about a certain subject. I try not to have topics that are too similar each month, because then people would get bored.”
A typical lineup might pair astronomy with vultures and shoreline ecology, with mental health thrown in to broaden the appeal.
“Some of those people, like me, didn’t know they wanted to know anything about vultures,” she said. “But they’re glad they stayed.”
Bird embraces the TED Talk comparison, especially since she books speakers who know how to hold a room. Some make their presentations interactive.
At the May 15 event, Matthew Jones, owner of Team Ukulele, LLC., delivered two talks. The first covered the science of sound and music, framed around the body as “a human instrument.” For the second, he passed out ukuleles to every attendee and led a playing lesson.
“What I love about Pints of Science is that people are very quiet during the talks — you can hear a pin drop,” Bird said. “Then we take a 10-minute break between speakers, and people are talking to each other about what they just learned. I love that.”
Lining up speakers, she said, is the easy part. After a few years of running the series, most come to her. But Bird vets every pitch, researching credentials and subject expertise before booking anyone — whether it’s a University of South Florida master’s student like Jordan Kleinschmidt Dilena, who spoke on squid and the effects of Tampa Bay’s changing environment, or a guitar-playing Ph.D.
“I’m not trying to have something like Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” Bird said. The topics can be unusual, she added, but the goal is education. “We’re not here to shock anyone. It’s not someone going up there riffing or doing a stand-up set.”
No topic is off limits, though, as long as it meets her standards. The strangest subject so far, she said: transgender gods.
Ryan T. Cragun, a religion instructor at the University of Tampa, gave that talk in July 2024. “It’s not like he didn’t know how to back it up,” Bird said.
She also builds themed months when the calendar calls for it — climate experts during hurricane season, for instance, including one who argued the Atlantic could eventually produce a Category 6 storm.
Bird does her own recruiting, too, within reason.
“I’m probably not going to ask Neil deGrasse Tyson,” she said. “But whoever we have, we always get a good turnout or a sellout. That’s why I’m expanding Pints of Science to Safety Harbor soon. People just love these TED Talks over a beer and a meal.”
Pints of Science
When: Second Wednesday of every month
Where: New World Brewery, 810 E. Skagway Ave., Tampa
For more information or upcoming speakers, visit https://www.newworldtampa.com/events.