Give the gift of drinking for only $1

A night out drinking with friends can get pretty costly, pretty quickly. You saddle up to the bar. She buys the first round of drinks. You buy the second round of drinks. Somewhere after the fourth or fifth round, you've lost count of whose turn it is to buy drinks. With a little liquid courage, you catch yourself saying "screw it" and now you're buying everyone in your group a round of drinks. If it's happy hour prices, then your generosity wont hurt your wallet too bad. But happy hour only lasts for a couple of hours until the drinks go back to full price.

What if there was a way where you could buy your friends cheap drinks at anytime of the night for prices even cheaper than what you'd pay during happy hour? The new app called Bartab is the self-proclaimed "Home of the $1 drinks" and allows you to buy drinks for yourself and your friends from any mobile device using Facebook, for only $1. That's right. You can buy your real friends, real drinks for only a dollar.

The basic concept behind Bartab is that you pay $1 to send a friend a drink. Your friend then claims the drink at the bar and pays $1 for their drink, plus tip. Please, for the love of God, do not stiff your bartender. This would be as bad as stiffing a bartender at an Open Bar.

Just signing up for the app, you receive a $5 bar tab that allows you to send out five drinks to either your friends or yourself for free. If any of your friends signs up for the app, you instantly receive a $10 bar tab. If you need to add money to your bar tab, just visit the "My Account" tab on the webpage. Bartab accepts Visa or MasterCard.

The app is a win-win for everyone involved. You get to buy cheap drinks for your friends. Your friends get to enjoy drinks on the cheap. The app brings new customers into the bar.

Here is how to app works. You install the free Bartab app from the app store, onto your mobile device. You then log into your Facebook account from the Bartab app. Once you're connected, pick a bar, the drink you want to purchase and choose your lucky Facebook friend. The drink is then sent to your Facebook friend via a posting on their wall and through a text message on their phone, giving them specific instructions on how to claim their drink. Once the drink is sent to the lucky Facebook friend, they then have 90 days to claim their drink. Recipients can claim their drink by showing the bartender their digital drink ticket. Once the drink recipient accepts their digital drink ticket, they have five minutes to claim their drink from the bartender.

You don't have to have an iPhone in order to use this app. Any sort of mobile device will do. There's the iPhone app, the Android app and there's also a mobile website that works with any phone that has an internet browser. If you're super old school, you can always redeem your drinks through SMS (good old text messaging.)

There are currently 14 different markets that contain over 600 bars in the network already. If you live in San Francisco, you can send a drink to your friend who lives in New York. A friend of mine who first introduced me to this app lives down in Los Angeles and was able to send me a drink that I could redeem here in San Francisco.

Please keep in mind that you can only claim one drink per hour and only one drink per bar a day. This app is perfect for bar hopping and pub crawls. Already redeemed your digital drink ticket at the bar? No problem. Wait an hour. Then visit another bar in the network to redeem a digital drink ticket from the next bar.

Also, just in case it wasn't already obvious, because we are buying alcoholic drinks here, you must be at least 21 years of age to buy and redeem drinks using the app.

Download the Bartab app and start being the fancy pants friend who buys the first round of drinks. Chances are, the more friends you have on the network, the more chance they'll buy you a drink right back.

Please drink and redeem your digital drink tickets responsibly. Tip your bartenders generously.

Redhook Brewery

On my recent trip up to Seattle, it was highly recommended to me that I take the Redhook Brewery tour in Woodinville. For a mere dollar, I could sample up to four of Redhook’s beers on tap, learn all about Redhook’s history, see how they brew their beer and take a souvenir tasting glass home. I was sold. Read More...

Busting Bar Myths: Why Corona is Garnished With a Lime

Corona is the #1 selling beer in Mexico, the #1 selling Mexican beer in the world and the #4 selling beer in the world. Corona is considered a pale lager that is made with water, barley, hops and yeast and is served in a clear bottle. I have served thousands of Coronas during my bartending career so far and have always wandered why Corona is always garnished with a lime wedge in the neck of the bottle. Read More...

Pilgrims Brought Beer to America?

I was reading "Bartending For Dummies" last night and came upon an interesting tidbit of information. According to the book (written by Ray Foley of Bartending Magazine), beer came to America via the Mayflower. Apparently, the Pilgrims were running low on beer so they decided to land at Plymouth Rock instead going more south as they had originally planned. The proof? The US Library of Congress has a journal kept by one of the Mayflower passengers with an entry dated from 1620 which states in regards to landing at Plymouth Rock:

"we could not now take time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent , especially our beer..."

I guess the Pilgrims didn't have the option of making a pitstop at 7-11 to refill their supply back in those days.

I love history.

Naked Lady Beer

Article: Australian beer does the clothing removal for you

Stolen from/written by Andrea Grimes
Blog: Heartless Doll

Debunking Guinness Myths

Here is an interesting article I found on debunking 10 Guinness myths.

Hope everyone had a safe and sane St. Patty's Day!

Anchor Steam Brewery, SF

I don’t like to drink beer, but I have to know a lot about it. As a bartender and a bartender school instructor, I not only serve and sell beer, but I also teach people who take my class about beer. I lecture my classes each week on how to pour a proper pint of beer, what a perfect Guinness pour looks like, the differences between a lager and an ale and why Hefeweizen comes garnished with a lemon. When my customers come into the bar and ask for a beer, I have to be ready to suggest a type of beer depending on their tastes and what we have in stock.

So in an attempt to educate myself more about the world of beer and hopefully develop a healthy palate for beer, I recently went on the Anchor Steam Brewery tour on Potrero Hill. The hour and a half tour of the brewery took us on three of the four floors in the brewery showing the entire process of how Anchor Steam produces their beer all the way to the packaging and shipping room.

The best part of the tour was the two-hour tasting. In the tasting room, Anchor Steam provided four of their beers on tap. While everyone in the tour group tasted all of the different beers, the brew master described the different flavors found inside each of the beers and encouraged everyone in the group to ask questions about the Anchor Steam company, its history and beer producing in general.

The Anchor Steam Brewery is truly a beer lover’s heaven. And as a non-beer drinker educator and seller myself, I found the tour extremely interesting, informative, and invaluable.

Ordering Beer

When people order a beer at the bar, I generally ask them two questions:

"Would you like bottled or draft beer?"
"Import or domestic?"

For most beer drinkers, they already know what they want to drink. Ask them these two questions and you wont have to rattle off your entire beer inventory. But every now and then, there will be customers who aren't really sure what they want. Once you recite every single type of beer you have in stock, they will then ask you for a beer you didn't list. It happens all the time. Why? Why?

Why are some people so stupid?

My usual response to someone who orders a beer we don't have after I have listed off every single beer we have in the house:

"I didn't say we had blank beer".

I will then just stand in front of the customer and wait patiently for them to place their order. I secretly enjoy it when other customers overhear the conversation taking place with said clueless customers. When those customers nearby give me the "Are you kidding me? You have to deal with that crap?" look, I feel slightly validated. After the transaction, I happily I proceed to help the next person who actually knows what he/she wants to drink.