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.

Cool things come from San Francisco

Cool things come from San Francisco such as the Golden Gate bridge, Cable Cars, Anchor Steam beer, Twitter and Drink Me Magazine.

Drink Me Magazine is a local print magazine that features 64-full color, glossy pages of San Francisco's bar and drinking culture every other month. The magazine is distributed FREE to its readers all over the city in local watering holes, liquor stores and at alcohol-related events.

This March will mark Drink Me Magazine's second year in print. Quite impressive especially since print publications seem to be a dying breed with everything going online lately.

Drink Me Magazine has no plans to slow down their growth spurt. Since they started publishing the magazine almost two years ago, the pages have doubled. The magazine is now up to 12 published issues. They just revamped their entire website and relaunched it this week. There is also word that the magazine is expanding to include New York in the near future.

Like I said, cool things come from San Francisco.

Be sure to check out the interview I did with Daniel Yaffe, the editor and publisher of Drink Me Magazine on my National Bartender page.

Who is Dale DeGroff?

And why is this guy so important in the bar world? "Mixologists" (especially the ones here in San Francisco) have this man to thank for making their cool title important behind the bar and in the bar industry.

DeGroff made bartenders cool and almost celebrity-like for foodies, food and drink critics and food and bar industry magazines.

I have King Cocktail to thank because he helped make it okay and perfectly acceptable to choose bartending as a viable career for whenever I decide to grow up.

Thanks Dale DeGroff. Now read why he is damn important HERE.