Bar Tales

Several years ago my wife & I toured the Guinness Brewery in Dublin. The giant building w/ several stories was paradise to me & my wife was a great sport, tagging along w/o much interest in brewing beer, but making no complaints.

At the end of the tour everyone was invited to the roof top panoramic bar for a fresh & properly poured pint of the black gold & a beautiful view of Dublin.

Never having Guinness before, my wife was reluctant, but willing to give it a try. After waiting at the bar for the long pour process, we received our two complementary pints. My wife took her first sip & in her best outside voice cried out: "OMG HOW CAN YOU DRINK THIS?"....Needless to say you could have heard a pin drop in a room full of 50+ people, tourists & staff. I sank deep into my stool, ordered my wife a Diet Coke and quietly nursed two pints of Guinness before hustling out to the gift shop....The key to marriage? Patience, understanding & forgiveness

Great idea for a thread!

 

Went to a bachelor party, early 90's. After golf and some bars, we ended the night at an establishment that featured unclad women. I was walking to the bathromm, and I passed this little tiny guy. I said to him, "You look just like Davy Jones". He turned to me and said in the most English of accents, "That's probably because I am Davy Jones". It was! Davy F-ing Jones! In the Kalamazoo MI Deja Vu!

There was a thing called The Bradys on Stage, or something like that, that toured smaller auditoriums around that time, and Mr. Jones was part of it (he guest starred on the Brady Bunch one episode). After the show, apparently he and the Brady boys (not the original actors) decided they needed some entertainment, and found their way to this place.

I spoke to him for a minute and had him sign a napkin or something, too bad it was the pre cell phone camera era. I was quite drunk, but he was very nice. The group I was with got bounced a short time after that, may have had something to do with us yelling,"hey Davy, you were the greatest maraca player ever!", and "Mike Nesmith sucked!, across the room.

Anyway, I'll never forget it. RIP Davy.

 

Most of my bar stories come from my mid 20s and have to do with bar tabs. Partying with ppl with a fondness for martinis, particularly of the chocolate variety. While I eschew the jet fuel and drink beer/craft beer. (I paid my share... and probably more, to avoid prison)

 

Here's another story. I was at a national meeting of all the sales employees of our company and we had a final night group dinner in a banquet room of the hotel where we were all staying.

After dinner a group of us (probably 12-14) went into the hotel bar. One guy who was the newest sales rep in the company was young and right out of college. Being new, he was quiet with the group (I think he was also somewhat shy) so we talked him into joining us to help him fit in. He admitted that he wasn't much of a drinker, so after having one or two beers he excused himself and went back to his room.

We all kept drinking for a couple hours, and when we'd had enough we asked for the bill. Someone knew which room the new kid was staying in and got the bright idea to charge the bill to his room. (No expense account for this.) So we all ponied up cash for what we thought our fair share of the bill along with a tip and collected enough to cover the bill and tip plus more. So we put it all in an envelope and gave it to the front desk clerk to give to the kid when we all checked out the next morning so he could use it to pay the 'extra' charge on his room bill. (I think the bar tab was $400-$500 plus the tip.)

Some of us were already in the lobby so we could watch his reaction when he came to check out, which was hilarious because he opened the envelope first before looking at his bill. He had no clue what was happening and hadn't looked at his room bill yet so someone from our group in the lobby told him to look at his room bill. Then he started laughing and knew that he was fitting into our group from then on. It was kind of a cruel joke, but we didn't let him suffer too long.

 

This thread is going to go long and far... enjoy!

 

Perhaps you may have noticed that some Americans are not on their best behavior when traveling overseas. Do you think we are always like that?

 

We might not be any worse but I’m pretty sure we are louder. But even within the U.S. I think people on average get louder the farther east you go. Not sure anyone on here will back me up on that but I’m putting it out there. As tourists my theory is that, because many of us don’t speak the language, we tend to “tune out” the locals and assume they can’t hear us either. Again maybe this is bullshit but it’s an observation I’ve made of fellow Americans in numerous other countries.

 

Another good one this crowd certainly will appreciate was when Stone did their tour of beer bars in the early '10's with an exceptional list of vintages of their best beers, a long list some of you may remember, incredible stuff. We got to Rattle and Hum early, but not early enough. Or so it seemed. R&H has a long bar that ends into an area with many tables. Well, the earliest crowd grabbed all the tables almost instantly, and the ones who couldn't get a table took barstools nearest the tables. We got seated mid bar, and at first we regretted not being able to get a table. But they let way too many people in, and the place became a zoo so that it was almost impossible to get the beers from bar to tables, and we ended up getting to try every beer we wanted with ease, incl. multiples of our favorites, as the servers gradually just started not to wade through the madness and instead concentrated on just pleasing the bar folks. Still remember the sad cries on-line for a week after from all the folks who claimed tables and couldn't get served properly. I did end up getting sick on the train home, but to this day it stands as a top five day of fifty years of beer drinking.

 

Haha, West coasters are mostly powderkegs who pretend to be all casual like us East coasters actually are.

 

There’s a place on Long Beach island NJ locals call the P Hole. I won’t name it but if you know you know . I know of a guy who stabbed a guy there when it was very crowded he did it more than once. That same guy got his teeth punched out for touching another guys wife. Face tattoos and fireball do not make you a tough guy is what I take from the story.

 

Agree to disagree on that one bro

 

I think it’s because many of us have several acres between ourselves and our nearest neighbor. It’s also why we invented the telephone.

 

I admit to spending much less time in Wa.. than in Ore. and Ca.., so should have been more specific.

 

Oh yeah those guys are wound tight.