The Bender: Places to get blackout drunk in Denver.

You don’t have to be a crazed soccer hooligan to appreciate the charms of Streets of London. They serve strong drinks to strong drinkers and as long as you can stand on two feet, they keep them coming. Mind your manners though, the crowd here can easily get fighty.

This dark bar, with it’s low ceiling, reminds me of a cave. A cave where drunken bears hibernate. I think most of the crowd here starts drinking draft beer at lunchtime and gets pushed out at last call. I’ve never talked to anyone in this bar who was not absolutley ’faced. Its nice to not be the drunkest person in the joint, and at the Casual, you never are.

The 404 is a classic hard-drinkers bar. It’s not the sort of place you drop into to have a single drink with friends. It’s the place you go by yourself to wash away a lifetime of sorrow. That is, if you can get that first drink. I went to the 404 a month ago and sat at the bar for 45 minutes, totally unnoticed by the bartender. I finally just got up and left, with a dry throat.

Me and some friends used to meet every tuesday night at the PS to discuss the state of the world. We took to calling this meeting “Tough-Love Tuesday” because we could tell the staff at the PS loved us, but they were also killing us with gallons of booze. Pete, the owner, has a talent for spotting a drunk customer who is just about to leave, and then buying him a round. Whew. I can remember going to the PS many times, I can hardly ever remember leaving there.

This quiet bar is the perfect spot to start a three-day bender. The days are filled with postal workers quietly drinking on the job and at night an assortment of tattoed types filter in. It’s never too noisy and the drinks are cheap and served without a lot of guff.

The service at the Squire can be slow, and rude, but they never saw a customer that was too drunk to serve. I’ve seen a bartender shake a customer awake at the bar to ask if he needed another drink. The Squire does an open-mic comedy night that draws a decent crowd and a surprising number of drunk college girls hang out there. If you are looking for drunken romance the odds are good. But the goods are odd.

I used to know a bartender who worked here and he conducted business behind the bar with all the finesse of a Heroin Pusher. He seemed determined to get evryone in the joint as loaded as he was. You could throw up on the bar and he would say, “You need to go home. Let me get you one last drink for the road”. He made overserving an artform.

A friend of mine was wondering why every time he went to Three Kings a barfight would break out. I suggested that the reason probably had something to do with every patron in the place being completely tanked. There seems to be an unspoken drinking contest going on in this bar at all times.