And We're Back On Top

I'm back! Ok, so I told you that yesterday, but here's where I will elaborate. On Friday I woke up feeling pretty good. I mean I still had some remnants of a cold, but nothing dehabilitating. But given that I did still have some of my cold, I had to come up with a solid drinking plan. Here's where I'll just make your case for you: The only good drinking plan while sick is to not drink. Happy? All right, let's move on. I needed to drink a few beers on Friday but I also needed to, you know, deal with still sort of having a cold. My plan was to drink a beer every two hours after getting out of class. This way, I wouldn't get drunk, I wouldn't flood my body with alcohol, and would in general be ok. So I get home at 2, have a Hell or High Watermelon at 2:30. Around 5, Liz gets home and I have Famosa with her (only one more left in the apartment!). Around 7:30, we take off for Lunasa, a bar in the East Village. Lunasa, as a bar, is perfectly fine. However, a friend of a friend (and through that link, sort of my friend) bar tends there, making the place fantastic. We stay at Lunasa from 8 to midnight, during which I have four Brooklyn Lagers, after which we go home.

I'm going to pause for a second here and tell you why Brooklyn Lager pops up here so frequently. Quite simply put, it's good, it's everywhere, and it's (relatively) cheap. Brooklyn Lager is to NYC what Yuengling Lager is to Pennsylvania. Just about every standard bar you go to out here (that is bars that aren't "beer bars") will have the macros, Blue Point (a macro, I know [it's made by Coors for those of you not in the know]), Stella, Guiness, Sam Adams, maybe Newcastle and Smithwicks, and definitely Brooklyn Lager. Out of these non-macro beers, Brooklyn Lager is always the cheapest. Those other non-macro beers are fine and all, but a dollar or two more fine than Brooklyn Lager? I don't think so my friends. Also, more often than not, I would prefer a nice crisp Brooklyn Lager to any of the aforementioned beers. Combine that with the whole "buying local is generally a good thing" motif, every time I'm at a non-beer bar bar, I will more than likely be drinking a Brooklyn Lager. So sorry for the redundancy, but I must abide by the wallet and the taste buds. That said, at beer bars, I will almost always go for something new.

So that brings us to Saturday. I start Saturday off with the aforepictured (that's a sweet word I just made up) Hell or High Watermelon, complete with an actual slice of watermelon!!!!! It being a gorgeous day and all, Liz and I hit up the park for a picnic. While bringing beers to the park would be great, and I do see it an awful lot, it is technically illegal. But then again, so is bringing a pitcher of rum punch, which we did, but it's much more inconspicuous. After the park, we go back home for a nap to prep for an insane evening in the Lower East Side!!!!

I'll tell this story in reverse. I had two beers that evening, both Brooklyn Lagers. I know I just said the evening was insane, but that was a lie. Here's what happened. We went to this bar 2A, which describes itself as a dive bar, but as my friend Ben astutely pointed out, for that area it just means that they don't have bottle service. We were there for a friend's birthday party. We show up at 11, the place is uncomfortably packed. I order us each a Brooklyn Lager, start a tab, the minimum is 20 bucks. So while we're drinking our beers, people start talking about moving to a less crowded bar. I have to get another round to meet the minimum, so I go do that, and close my tab thinking that we're all on our way out. After another two hours, it becomes clear that this is not happening, but my tab is already closed. If I wanted one more beer, I would have had to get four more beers, and I just didn't want to do that. So instead, I sat there beerless, talking to friends, and left the bar at 3AM, COMPLETELY SOBER. Not to say I didn't have a perfectly fine time doing that, but this was prime Saturday night real estate here. To not drink a beer when I most certainly could have just seems so very wrong. I guess the moral of this story is to always carry cash. Live and learn. Live and learn.

Total Beers: 235

Where I Should Be: 216.438