Author: Samuel Sly Location: Denver I was sitting in the middle of I-70 traffic, had inched one tenth of a mile over the course of 20 minutes and was now at a standstill. My teeth: sore from clenching. My knuckles: white from an iron-clad grip on the steering wheel. My […]
Experiences
Cheap Beer and Failure: The Rocket Fuel of Dreams
Author: Samuel Sly Not many people know this is actually the second coming of BnL. The website is about journeys – beer soaked journeys. The voyage of how we arrived at this point is a beer soaked tale that never really gets discussed because it involves a bit of failure. […]
Rocking Beer Festivals – The Epic Beer Festival
I thought I knew how to rock a beer festival up until a few weeks ago. My confidence was shattered when I poured at a beer festival and wound up falling off my bike 10 times and shredding my elbows. I recently went for redemption at the Epic Beer Festival’s […]
Swimming with Left Handed Fishes at Lake Dillon
I woke up with a pug’s butthole in my face Sunday morning. Luckily, I knew exactly where I was even though I wasn’t positive how I got there. Animal ass in your face tends to make you take a moral and physical inventory, or at least it should, and I […]
Drinking with Strangers: Pliny the Younger
I‘m walking along Colfax on a sunny February morning in Denver eating a banana. I’ve only lived in this neighborhood a month, and today is my first walk downtown. I’m nervous. Damn nervous. It’s not my surroundings, possibility of a zombie breakout or fear of dropping my banana. I’m heading […]
Farewell to the Dive Bar that Shaped My Youth
I’m drawn to dingy venues, cheap beers and juke boxes like a 12 year old boy to tits. This past summer, a bar that was a hugely influential pair of tits to me closed, and I want to pay the appropriate tribute. We all had an establishment from our early […]
With Great Beer Comes Great Responsibility
I wake up on the couch fully clothed. It’s six am and my alarm is going off because I’m an idiot who doesn’t turn off his alarm on a holiday weekend. The world is too loud, too bright and spinning way too goddamn fast. I’m all for new experiences (If […]
Ending the Vision Quest and Approaching the New Year
I’m on a bus in Aspen, Colorado and it’s about 28 hours until 2013 starts. If you’re just joining the story, you should click here and here to get some background on why I’m on the bus and the remarkable journey I took to get to this point. Like a […]
Hot Tubs, Gummy Bears and Fireballs in Aspen – Part Two
Last week’s post ended with me in the middle of Aspen, Colorado making the most of a New Year’s Eve vacation in a city I’m unfamiliar with and may be prejudice against. We already spent one evening at a fine restaurant, overslept for snowboarding, and were now digging into some […]
Aspen: Not just for the Hollywood elite – Part One
I posted once about my distaste for high-end clubs and rubbing elbows with the social elite. I’ll re-emphasize: I would rather sit in a dive bar talking to a guy speaking indecipherable gibberish, fearing for my life than go to a club and fist pump with a bunch of goofy-haired, […]
Dive In: A Night in the arms of Chicago’s Dive Bar Culture
Chicago. The Windy City. Chi-Town. This is a city with rich history and heritage. After becoming a town of merely 200 people, its perfect location between the great lakes and the Mississippi River caused the population to explode making it an international hub. A massive fire in the late 1800’s […]
Stepping out of the comfort zone
It seems like so many stories I read on the internet focus on glamorous, trendy places where people go to have fabulous drinks, food and are surrounded by beautiful people. FUCKING BARF. Ok, let me take that back (FRAB GNIKCUF), because every once in a while that sort of evening […]