Beer Town Austin

There are better Saint Arnold Pub Crawl wrap ups and coverage out on the internets, but since I took pictures I figured I might as well post ‘em.

Why only 75% of the story?

My wife and I had tickets to see Damien Jurado and Balmorhea at 9, so I skipped out on Little Woodrow’s.

So JIB and I went out last Friday, 2-19-10 with 448 other crawlers to drink Saint Arnold beers and walk around in large groups downtown. It was pretty fun.

Started out at ZAX Pints and Plates. It’s a cool place, sort of small for 450 crawlers, but if you got there on time it wasn’t bad. I hope that some oblivious boyfriend took his girl there planning on proposing, or maybe breaking up, or something intimate that got ruined by a lot of people showing up. It was semi-flash-mob-ish.

Craft Aaron brought his baby.

Josh and Sarah were there too (I just literally copy/pasted most of that last sentence wt links from Aaron’s page).

Also Frank Mancuso, the Saint Arnold ATX rep was on hand stamping out stamp cards and posing for photos (see bellow).

Sorry for having to use the flash, Frank. Shawn (the taker of all the good photos on this site) couldn’t make it out Friday.

After drinking some of the SA Winter Stout, we hoofed it over to the new Ginger Man. It was at capacity when we arrived and were presented with the option to have our second stamp punched and move on to Ghost Room (the old Ginger Man).

Standing in line on the street didn’t sound much like pub crawling to us, so we took the punch and run to Ghost Room option.

As a consolation for missing out on Ginger Man, Brock was at Ghost Room waiting to punch cards, shake hands, and kiss babies.

This was my first trip to the ol’ Ginger Man corpse, and it took a bit for me to stop talking about it. I’m sure I was getting annoying. Sadly, the inside was gutted, but the outside patio was pretty much as awesome as ever. Down to only six tap holes, the Amber was the only Saint Arnold beer flowing, and it got killed within 30 minutes.

On the patio we ran into Terry, who produces When In Austin. It’s a local podcast a la This American Life. I’m not sure if it’s intentionally beer focused, but the pub crawl was his second recent local beer story. Terry does a good job, check out his show.

Thanks to the patio, the lesser crowd, the handshake from Brock, and meeting Terry of When In Austin, the Ghost Room was prolly the highlight of my pub crawl experience.

I agree wt that jerk who brought his baby on a pub crawl, Opal Divine’s Freehouse should have been on the crawl.

Sure it was crowded, the beer ran out at a few locations, you couldn’t get into some places, and blah blah blah, I’m thankful that the gents from Saint Arnold saw enough of a craft beer scene in Austin to come down and attempt this first crawl. Let’s hope they do it again.

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