Ride bikes, drink beer, be awesome, sleep, eat and repeat as necessary. Last night was the latest installment of the Tour de Brew LNK ride and if you judge based purely on the numbers one could easily argue that it was the best one yet, I heard somewhere between 90-120 riders showed up to partake in the cold offerings from Zipline Brewing.
Started off at Moran's Liquor Works, to get the registration formalities out of the way and to sample a few beers from Zipline. These guys have really come on strong as of late, a year and a half/two years ago you'd probably be hard pressed to find that many people who could tell you who or what Zipline Brewing was but now it seems that they have just exploded onto the local beer scene. It doesn't hurt that they brew up some of the best beer coming out of Lincoln right now or that they offer cheese and beer pairings frequently at their tap room and they are super bike friendly and lets be honest craft beer and biking just go together; whatever the reason, people are certainly talking about this little brewery now and just the opposite is now true; you'd be hard pressed to find someone in Lincoln and maybe even eastern Nebraska who hasn't heard them.
Once you've downed all of the free samples at Moran's you can reasonably manage without looking like a heroin addict looking for his free methadone hand out, it was off to Cycle Works for more man sized servings via $2 bottles and some fat bike drooling... mmmm, fat bike.... Oh you gonna take me home tonight, Oh down beside that red fire light, Oh you gonna let it all hang out, Fat tired bikes you make the riding world go round!
As I said there was a really phenomenal turn out last night, it's a good thing we cyclists don't mind the smell of our own brand because it was pretty steamy out and we were producing in ode de swamp ass in quantities.
First stop on the tour was Longwell's down in the recently developed Rail Yard section of the Haymarket, I had never been before but it was pretty swanky bar with some really good food.
So what do you do if you're a bit more upscale and you have 100 sweaty, smelly cyclist swarm your establishment... simple, you put them out on the back patio area, feed them food and pour them ice cold beer.
The TV could have been a little bigger but beggars can't be choosers as they say...
After filling up on food and even more beer it was off to The Hot Mess, our final destination for the evening. The Hot Mess is 100% dive bar, you could argue that fact if it happens to be "your bar" but you'd be wrong, fortunately I love dive bars. Each and every dive bar has it's own personality, it's own type of clientele and a unique atmosphere that you just can't get from the more traditional establishments worried about their image, The Hot Mess was neither of those places and it lived up to expectations.
Any place that has to tell it's patrons not to eat the toilet mint is a place I'd definitely belly up to the bar and throw back a few cold ones; mostly to try to figure out who has the minty breath with that underlying tell tale hint of urine and then strike up a conversation with them. Lord knows if they don't have a problem using the toilet mint as a tic-tac you know they have to have some other interesting stories to tell.
Plus any bar good enough for Chuck is a bar good enough for me, even if the drink that bears his namesake most likely tastes worse than the a fore mentioned mint. For a dude known for his bad-assery he sure did endorse a pansy ass drink.
One little, two little, three little ghosts... you'd have thought I used the flash for this one but honestly this trio was so white they glowed in the dark. It's called the sun people, comes up everyday around 6 and sticks around for most of the day, go say hi sometime. I kid, I kid, I joke, I joke, thet guy from Zipline had some interesting stories to share and the Moran brothers (probably not their real last name... but who knows) are always fun to chat with. I blame beer for the reason I can't remember anyone's name ever or mine half the time for that matter; drunken stupor and Alzheimer look a lot a like if you're not close enough to smell the alcohol.
Remember those people I was talking about earlier that frequent dive bars... yeah... those people, these would be a good example.
Can't wait until next month to ride bikes, drink beer and take pictures of some interesting adventures, I would say it'd be fun to do this every week but I think my liver would emphatically disagree. Once again my hats, er... helmets off to all of those who do all of the work putting these events on so lazy dudes who like beer have some place and someone to go drink beer with at least once a month.
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