Popination (part 2)
A vocab word that’s always glad you came…
Popination Ruminations, Part Deux
Taverns of Today
As a reminder from last week’s popination rumination: I’ve divided my popinations into three chronological categories: distant past, more recent past, and present. Last week, we looked at many popinated pubs from the past. This week, we’ve gotten to present day. It’s funny, looking back: my pub-going has changed a lot compared to my early popinating days, and I can see it’s for two main reasons: 1) the pandemic. It shut everything down for a good long while, and then when things began to reopen here and there like popcorn in a microwave, it was touch and go: which places would be closed forever, which places took a long time to rehire and reestablish their old glory, and which places popped right open, ready for popinations as though nothing had happened? 2) My moving away from Boulder into South Denver, a much more suburban area, and one with whose good haunts I was unacquainted. I was locked down here in Centennial in my partner’s house during the strict closing of everyplace, and then only infrequently went back to my Boulder studio after things got flowing again, until finally in June of 2022, I moved in to my partner’s place officially and completely. Big transitions. Big beers.
Sort of past, kinda present-ish
This oddly liminal-sounding time period I count as just post-lockdown pub-opening in 2021, through 2022 and my own living transition, up until the beginning of this school year. Yes I still measure my years by the academic calendar. What?
Slattery’s
This one spans recent past and present day—I still bring people here when I need to meet with someone I don’t know very well, or haven’t seen in a while, or if I like, have an interview or something. I used to come here to write two or three times a week, before the next pub on my list was established, and before the pandemic stopped all popinations. Most of my memoir was generated here, and I’d look at Herb Childress’ feedback emails and pore over each chapter right here at the bar over a Titan IPA or a Tullamore Dew. Maybe I should do a book signing here once it’s published?
This was also a place I could get to easily from the light rail, and is pretty close to my partner’s home, so he and I found this place to be very central and important in our early re-relationship. We would meet here in between my commute and going home to Boulder or the other way visiting him, and their Irish nachos are still a go-to snack meal for us, especially on hangover days. Which are pretty few and far between these days, honestly.
Slatt’s is your classic American corporate Irish bar, and as such, it’s got a wide range of Irish whiskeys and also a good long row of taps. Unfortunately it does dye its beer green on St. Paddy’s Day, but ehhhh. They’re a comfortable, if large and sprawling, restaurant in the complex of the luxury Landmark condos, in South Denver. You know the kind of place. When I was a very regular regular, I was friends with a few of the women who tended bar, most of which would gently complain at the unofficial dress code, remarking that it was becoming almost a Hooters. But it hasn’t gotten quite that exploitative, at least not that I’ve noticed in my not-as-frequent frequentings recently.
Slattery’s holds a dear place in my popinating heart, as they hung on longest before closing at the lockdown of the pandemic, was active in parking lot orders out during, and were one of the very first to open back up with masks and expanded outdoor seating once it was allowed.* It was a place of great comfort for my partner and myself, and I’m glad they’re still going strong. I am cheating on them though, these days, with the next pub on my list:
*I was there the day the mask mandate was lifted. Beloved bartender, petite Tia, tore hers off and tossed it into the air like a graduation cap, as the whole place echoed with relieved cheers.
Today’s present haunts (boo! 👻):
The “present” in this case refers to… well, literally today (though I may not literally be going out today. We’ll see. I mean I am writing this here today, but I may not be here today when this is published. But anyway). This period obviously overlaps just a little bit into the recent past, as well. And there’s really only one place I popinate at regularly enough to call it so these days:
I.C. Brewhouse
I.C. Brewhouse is literally across the street from my current residence, literally about 20 paces away from my back door. Okay I should actually count the steps for real. Here, I’ll go do that and come back, one sec… okay so actually literally? It’s 150 steps from their patio gate to my front door.
There are two of these Brewhouses, which aren’t brewhouses at all, as they don’t brew on premises. I’d call them taphouses. They’re each built to align with an attached apartment complex, though I hear that this one in Centennial isn’t owned by them anymore? I dunno. The idea is that I.C. = Inner Circle, like, you’re one of the special ones that live here and so you come to this bar. We don’t technically live in the adjacent apartments, but across the street is close enough and my partner and I (and often, his kids) come here for their birria tacos and their chicken sandwiches and their churros and their Wine Down Wednesdays (just the adults do the wine, natch).
Though I usually like beer when popinating, I tend to not like I.C.’s tap offerings most of the time, and so I drink wine or good bourbon when I’m there instead.* They’ve got a great bourbon from Mile Hi Spirits: a distillery in downtown Denver that I discovered while walking the runway for a local fashion show called Denver Unique Week of Fashion. This super-cool event often took place at Mile Hi, and so I would explore their wares after wearing amazing designs by local artists, and flaunting them in front of Denver fashion scene audiences. I found all of Mile Hi’s whiskey-ish offerings to be delicious, so imagine my delight when I discovered that I.C. carries a whole range of their spirits.
I still come here nearly daily, the same way I used to at Slattery’s and way back at Backcountry pizza in Boulder. I.C. opened during the depths of the pandemic, which explains in part why I never tried them till pretty recently. But once I did, I wrote the last bits of my memoir here, revised it all sitting at this bar, and I still come here to work on any number of projects (including articles for my Substack about popinations! Woooo, how meta…).
*Nothing to do with the quality of their beer, it’s just of a type that I don’t prefer. I like my IPAs clear and bitter, whereas their IPA choices tend to be the hazy type. I used to like a good craft lager, but no longer. So. Nothing wrong with their taps, it just ain’t my vibe, unless I’m taking a break from alcohol, in which case I’ll drink a bunch of their Heineken 0.0s. Also: Shoutout to Lindsay, subscriber and marvelous bartender, who asked when I’d be writing about her workplace! Here ‘tis! Hope I did you proud!
Honorable Mention: Not a tavern, not a pub…but a bar of a different sort
…try not to judge me. Here we go…
T Devon Pub
This is actually not a pub (despite its name), or a tavern, and not the type of bar you’ve seen in my list up till now. They don’t call themselves a saloon, either, though they’re much more like that than anything else. They actually do have a similar crunchy vibe to the Outback, from last week’s popinations list.
T Devon is a cigar bar, and so I wasn’t sure if it counted for inclusion on this list. But I do go there kinda frequently, and I do socialize with my partner and the friendly regulars, and drink whiskey, whenever I do. So let’s call this an honorable mention.
A cigar bar?! Ah yes, lest ye think too highly of me, I do like to partake in the occasional smoke. In the ‘90s, I smoked much more often than occasionally: in the mid to late ‘90s, I was a member of Frequent Flyers dance company in Boulder, an aerial dance troupe with a long and glorious history. After a hard evening of training, coaching, or rehearsing, our little group of dancers would stand outside, grab the cold metal railing with our aching hands, and then we’d stand around and chat for a bit in the parking lot of the studio, in a little smoking circle. I wasn’t a smoker at first, though I had learned how to smoke in a two-person play I was in about a writer and Bette Davis, but I hung out with the smoking dancers anyway for the social time. They’d often ask if I wanted a smoke, and I always refused. Once, the dancers asked why. I responded, “Oh I don’t mind it, I just don’t like the taste.” One of the dancers smiled, a mad gleam in his eye, held out his dark brown cigarette, and declared, “You’ll like this!”
It was a clove cigarette, dear readers, and I did indeed like it. So much so that from then on, I smoked cloves and then later, pipe tobacco on a pretty much daily basis. Cigars weren’t my thing, but the fragrant aspect and the difficulty smoking is similar, and cigars were a thing for the men I swordfought with around this same time. It was also the smoke of choice for my late paternal grandfather, Grandpa Rudy, a tough as nails Chicago Pole who had a den in his Wisconsin cabin that I drool to think of now. He and his den smelled pleasantly of that caramel-like scent of cigars, and I have fond memories of him. I liked him, and he liked me, which wasn’t a dynamic the rest of my family tended to share. But I digress. Sort of. Anyway. I quit my habitual smoking practice in the early aughts, and only relatively recently have taken up very occasional cigars, as a rare treat.
T Devon is not my first cigar popination, though—there was another that was really my partner’s place more than mine, which unfortunately went the way of the Pandemic Dodo: it closed during lockdown and never opened again. RIP Robusto Room. There’s also the rough jewel that is Las Palmas, just East enough of downtown Denver to be in a very crunchy neighborhood. This place, though, boasts the only certified cigar hand-roller in Colorado, and the smokes there are beyond belief. My partner and I used to go there pretty frequently until the main man, Mike, would plonk our Jamesons-on-the-rocks in front of us the moment we walked in the door. That guy. He had some amazing stories about his time as a bodyguard, and I don’t care which were true, I’m believing all of them. A towering hulk of a man, with a certain calm demeanor that makes me think he’s the kind of guy you do NOT want to cross, and you better believe he remembers your face, no matter if you only popped in once ten years ago. I haven’t been to Las Palmas in forever—I should go back soon.
But! Back to T Devon: Dive bar? cigar bar? Are cigars upper class, or for rednecks? I notice the reddest of the necked men there tend to smoke cigarettes, and that the population of this popination destination is pretty diverse. Well, that makes it a perfect Third Place, doesn’t it? I’ll not question it, but enjoy it as often as I can. Man, suddenly I could really use a smoke…
Conclusion: pub crawls and other snail-like practices
I doubt I have the stamina for an actual pub crawl anymore. Physically or alcoholically. Then again, I have never been much of a pub crawler to begin with—I tend to treat all my taverns as Third Places; comfort zones where I show up so regularly that the bartenders end up knowing me and my order. Places where I can sit for a long while in conversation, or work on my writing. So I guess popination isn’t really a word that names a practice of mine, unless we can allow the term to refer to frequenting taverns but not in one go.
How about you? Do you popinate ever? Did you do so before the pandemic and now haven’t started back up again? Do you miss any taverns from your past that are no longer? Have you been to any of mine?
ALSO! It has been suggested to me that a series here on Substack of these kind of part personal essay, part pub review, would be a welcome addition to my newsletter. I can already think of three popination places off the top of my head that are from Bars of Yore and of Occasional Present Visits, and three more I’ve never been to but keep meaning to try. What do you think? Should I begin a new series of that, once my Lord of the Rings lecturettes run out?
Tell me what you think, though, in the comments. Otherwise I’ll just do it anyway…🍺