SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: "The Black Bartenders That Created the Dive Bar."

I'll introduce this long but amazing read, and step out of the way.

The word "dive" as shorthand for a certain type of tavern experience has roots in England, migrated to Americas' cities by the Great Lakes, and contains a big African-American component.

It's a must read for anyone who is serious about what they're drinking -- and where.

The Black Bartenders That Created the Dive Bar, by David Wondrich (The Daily Beast)

The roots of the dive bar go back to the 19th century and quite possibly to Buffalo, New York.

Part of writing history is finding a path around the load of stories and “facts” that have been handed down to us so that you can see the real people standing behind them. When it comes to the history of drinking in America, one of those “facts” is that bartenders were always beefy white guys with mustaches. That path is not easy to find, maybe because we’ve been looking in the wrong places.

There are two enduring traditions of the American bar. The first one involves mixing delicious drinks from quality ingredients in elegant surroundings. It’s got lots of mahogany and polished brass and people on their best behavior sipping from jewel-like glasses holding icy little puddles of concentrated delight. Back when drinks cost fifteen cents or two for a quarter, at these joints your quarter only got you one drink. Nowadays, these are the places where a hipster with interesting ink all over her arms mixes you a spectacular Bittered Mai Tai with cachaça and nocino and charges your credit card $15 for it. Let’s call this the fancy tradition—fancy drinks in fancy bars for fancy people.

Then there’s the other one. The one with friends in low places. The lowdown tradition, let’s call it, is, of course, the one with the shots and the ice-cold bottles of Miller High Life; the one where there’s a jukebox, which is always playing something as old and familiar as the street where you learned to ride a bicycle, where the person on the next stool is as likely to work in the post office as a law office, and where “maintenance” is spelled d-u-c-t-t-a-p-e. It’s the one with the dives ...

THE BEER BEAT: A neighborhood dive bar for the post-craft beer world?

Samuel Smith Brewery, Tadcaster UK ... 2001. 

In my current frame of mind, what makes so many contemporary beer drinking venues unrewarding isn't bad beer. On the contrary, there's lots more good beer than ever before.

Rather, it's feeling like a lab rat, as though you're part of an ongoing experiment in anxiety escalation -- like an arms race, always hoppier, sourer, stronger and plain weirder; the wheel constantly is revolving, and there's nothing upon which to hang one's metaphorical chapeau for longer than one keg (a sixth barrel), lest another begin pouring the diametrical opposite.

Granted, a dive bar is something very different.

CALLING REGULAR BARS 'DIVES' IS AN INSULT… TO DIVE BARS, by T.S. Flynn (Thrillist)

... By the end of the '80s, the term "dive" even began appearing in the names of new drinking establishments -- a trend that, regrettably, continues to this day. One of the first, Christy’s Dive Bar in Boca Raton, FL, opened in a shopping mall in 1987. "I liked the idea of a casual, come-as-you-are, regular-guy place,” owner Allen Christy told the Boca Raton News.

Of course, it took more than a couple of cult movies and a mall bar in Boca to turn "dive" into a wildly misapplied and overused appellation. The culprits are legion, but I suspect the rise of the internet and the popularity of clickbait articles and a certain Food Network show deserve the lion's share of blame. In 2006, Food Network aired an intended one-off special featuring a spiky-haired host named Guy Fieri, who invited viewers to join him on a road trip to America's best diners, drive-ins, and dives. Ten years and 260 episodes later, the frost-tipped huckster has yet to visit a true dive.

However, I contend that "craft" beer needn't be seen as something that replaces the neighborhood bar as in Chan's scenario below. I think better beer can be a valued component of precisely this sort of neighborhood bar, one run according to time-honored principles of consistency and predictability: Three fixed taps that don't rotate, plus a couple that do, and maybe a keg of cider. A few well-chosen cans and bottles. Some light food ... and dependable service.

Instead of the bill of fare spinning around like an unceasing Ferris wheel, perhaps a publican might concentrate on the things that always delineated the finest qualities of a neighborhood bar. Merely do it with better beer than before -- not RateAdvocate's top rating, just better. Solid. Reliable.

Let the room stop spinning, and maybe we can have a conversation. Is that so revolutionary?

What Happens When Craft Beer Replaces Your Neighborhood Bar?, by Tristan Chan (PorchDrinking)

 ... We need places like Jake’s, Phil’s Place and Cold Crush. We desperately need these safe havens for all cultures, demographics, socioeconomic classes, and identities, that allow these regional melting pots to come together for a beer. We need a place to watch the game over a hot plate of wings without paying LoDo prices, battling for LoDo parking, warding off LoDo personalities. We need funky eclectic murals of Von Miller spanning the length of the building. And while I’ll likely frequent the upcoming RiNo Beer Garden once it opens in 2-3 months (and I’ll probably end up loving it), what we honestly don’t really need right now is another beer bar.