• Blake Collins

Tap & Bottle opens today after a long wait, but looking at the beer menu from their soft opening on Saturday night, the establishment owned by husband and wife Scott and Rebecca Safford at 403 N. Sixth Ave. will be well worth the wait for beer fans.

“We wanted a nice range,” says Scott Safford. “I love IPA's while Rebecca loves farmhouse ales and saisons.”

Rebecca Safford says the couple "wanted a mix of those we know and love and those that are new and different.”

“The Ritterguts Gose is something we've never had before, but were excited about and wanted to try,” says Rebecca. “Some come from our dream list, the ones we wanted ever since we started working on the idea for Tap & Bottle. For instance, Marble's Double IPA is never available on tap in Tucson. I'm from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Marble is from, and we were in there one day telling them about our business, and they ended up shipping it to us specially.”

There are also a couple local picks from Dragoon and 1055, with plans to add the Borderlands Citrana Wild Ale when the Ritterguts gose runs out.

Tap & Bottle is open Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to midnight, and Sunday from noon to 6 p.m.

Thanks goes out to Alex Balk of the wonderful website The Awl for mentioning that it's Bourbon Day. According to Wikipedia and seemingly a thousand websites that get their information from Wikipedia, on this date in 1789, Dr. Elijah Craig put his corn-distilled whiskey in charred oak barrels. While the Craig story is generally considered a charming, but utterly false legend, that shouldn't keep us from enjoying a glass a bit later, should it?

• beerpulse.com
• Yeah, they went there.

Apparently Hanson, the band of mop-topped brothers from the mid-'90s that all of the girls I went to elementary school with cooed about, has shifted priorities a bit.

They've gone from focusing directly on music (and families and whatever) to, uh....beer.

From Beer Pulse:

Some of you will be celebrating Memorial Day Weekend with a trip to the movies to watch Hangover 3. Hanson’s Mmmbop makes an appearance in the flick so the band was invited to the movie premiere earlier this week.

They brought beer.

The MmmHops beer concept that the band revealed back in November of 2011 is now a reality thanks to the work of Mustang Brewing. Both the band and the brewery hail from Oklahoma and a tasting event was held at a bar there last year. The final product is a pale ale.

In a red carpet interview at the premiere, the band quipped that “You can now get a hangover with Hanson,” before belting out an ear-shattering a capella rendition of an upcoming tune. They also said that the beer would be available “this month.”

No word on whether or not this beer will be carried around here anywhere (though I'm looking at you, Plaza Liquors and the fairly-soon-to-open Tap and Bottle), but when it does, I'll be sure to dive atop that hop grenade for each and every one of you.

It's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

The Fifth Annual Agave Fest is happening Friday, May 3 at Hotel Congress.

Over 40 tequilas, mezcals, sotols, and baconoras will be on hand for tasting as well as an agave cocktail throw-down contest by some of Tucson’s best bartenders (mixologists, if you are a hipster). Cocktails from the likes of Aaron Defeo of Casino Del Sol,
 Luke Anale of Penca,
 Cameron Fisher of Hotel Congress, 
Kwon of 47 Scott,
 Andrew Record of Playground,
 Ally Baron of La Cocina, 
Jon Herrara of Elliot’s on Congress 
and Danel Cole of Sky Bar will be fighting for the votes.

Tickets are $35 in advance, and that’s a bargain for what you get: Tastes of over 40 different agave spirits, taco and salsa bar from the Cup Café, souvenir Patron shot glass, cocktails from awesome bartenders, and the chance to vote for the best cocktail of the night.

Go here for all the details and to get tickets.

• A photo from an Utah beer takeover at World of Beer Tempe

Good news if you like beer (not so great news if you hate franchises, I suppose), as the nationwide chain World of Beer is opening a 3,150 square foot location in the Cadence property downtown. World of Beer already has a location on Mill Avenue in Tempe, which will inevitably lead to the "Downtown is turning in to Mill!" uproar that frequently pops up around here, for understandable reasons.

For what it's worth, the Tempe location has 50 beers on tap (and good ones), a ton of stuff in bottles, and you can buy a mixed six-pack to go, and it would stand to reason (although I haven't heard from the World of Beer marketing person yet) that those some qualities would be present at the new Tucson location, set to open in November. On the other hand, there are plenty of great beers on tap already at local establishments downtown and it would appear Tap & Bottle might actually be close to opening on the other end of the area soon.

Decide for yourself whether this is a good thing or not near the end of the year.

Bars all over Tucson celebrate St. Patrick's day with Irish music, corned beef and cabbage, Irish Car Bomb specials and of course, green beer.

If you're wondering where to find green beer this Sunday here's a list of places. I was also able to find out what kind of beer would be dyed green at some of these bars, though I would guess they're all pretty much doing the same thing: adding green food coloring to their domestic drafts (except for craft breweries of course).

1. Wooden Nickel Tavern, 1908 S. Country Club, $2 pints and $7 pitchers (Sunday)
2. Diablo's Sports Bar & Grill, 2545 S. Craycroft, $2 pints (Sunday noon to 9 p.m.)
3. The Maverick, 6622 E. Tanque Verde, $3.50 (Saturday)
4. R-Place Bar & Grill, 3412 N. Dodge, $2 pints of Budweiser, Bud Light and Miller Lite (Sunday)
5. Risky Business, 8848 E. Tanque Verde, 6866 E. Sunrise Dr. and 250 S. Craycroft, $3 pints and $4.50 mugs of Miller Lite and Coors Lite (Sunday)
6. Thunder Canyon Brewery, 7401 N. La Cholla Blvd. and 220 E. Broadway, $2.50 pints of their Sandstone Cream Ale (Saturday and Sunday)
7. Golden Nugget, 2617 N 1st Ave., Budweiser and Bud Light (Sunday)
8. Maloney's and The Wreck, 213 N. Fourth Ave. (Sunday)
9. O'Malleys, 247 N. Fourth Ave.
10. Toby Keith's I Love This Bar & Grill, 4500 N. Oracle, $3 pint of Coors Light and Miller Light (in mason jars)

If for some reason you can't get to a bar, or you just don't want to drink light beer (and who would?) you can always make your own green beer.

The following recipe is from about.com:

Prep Time: 1 minute

Total Time: 1 minute

Ingredients:

One 12oz. Beer - any beer will do although lighter colored beers will display the green better
Green food coloring - one drop
Preparation:

Add one drop of green food coloring to a clear glass. Pour the beer into the glass.

That's it! This works for any beer. Darker beers like stout will have a nice green head atop their normally dark bodies.

Serves 1.

Of course, the lighter the beer the more green it'll be, but blonde ales, Stella Artois and more tasteful lagers than your average domestic drafts are pretty light.

The owners of 47 Scott will be bringing Caribbean food and a lot of rum to downtown Tucson this August.

After some construction delays thanks to the age of the building, Saint House, is set to open August 15 at 256 E. Congress, filling the space left behind by Shark's Nightclub.

The owners decided to pause construction after a few delays and open when streetcar construction on Congress Street is finished, Nicole Flowers, co-owner of 47 Scott said.

"It's a Caribbean restaurant based around all the different regions where rum comes from," Flowers said. "So we'll have a lot of rum drinks a lot of different rums."

The food will be based off of the Caribbean, Flowers added, but also Caribbean cuisine influences such as South America, France and the United Kingdom and the surrounding islands.

Having the streets open to traffic in August will help people get into downtown easily which makes for great timing. In May 2010, 47 Scott was one of the first new concepts in downtown Tucson. Flowers said she doesn't see many vacant spots in the area, "which is nice."

"We ... are all in on downtown as far as businesses and any future businesses that we do," Flowers said. "We've seen a lot of growth with everyone else opening since then ... it'll just be nice to have a walkable, urban feeling downtown here in Tucson."

The new Whole Foods location is hitting the ground running. On Tuesday, March 5th at 6:30 p.m., the Whole Foods location at 5555 E River Rd. will be having a beer dinner in their brand new bar. $30 gets you four courses from Chef Nathan Hirsch's kitchen, paired with four beers personally selected by the guys at Dragoon Brewing.

For reservations or for further questions call 461-1300 or email [email protected].

If you've not heard of the folks at Ten Fifty-Five Brewing, we suggest you start getting acquainted (start here and here), with one of Tucson's latest nanobrewing ventures.

We also suggest that you follow the good folks behind "Hopped Up," Spent Grains, who've gone to some of the best beer-centric joints in Tucson to figure out what makes the people who run them tick.

The promotional materials boasted it as 'Tucson's Biggest Party,' and last Friday's #FridayThe15th blowout at the Seasons Apartments near 1st Avenue and Wetmore was well on its way to living up to that hype.

That is, until some late-arriving but still overly eager partygoers started doing a really bad interpretation of storming the gates of paradise and ruined the fun for everyone else.

Tucson police estimate about 2,000 people were crowded around the pool at Seasons when, after discussions between a fire marshal and Seasons management, the gates to the pool area were locked to keep things from getting even more packed.

"Then people started climbing the gates to get in," Tucson Police Department spokesman Sgt. Chris Widmer said. "It was actually the manager that shut the music down."

#FridayThe15th was broken up around 11 p.m. Friday, Widmer said.

While the majority of posts on the party's Facebook event page seemed to blame the cops for being buzzkills, Seasons manager Megan Brown said it was all her call. It was just a matter of safety that prompted the party to get shut down early, she said.

"It was insane," Brown said. "It was amazing, people were having a great time. We just didn't have the space for all those people. The amount of people that came was overwhelming."

Though the pool area was only supposed to hold about 1,000 people, it was expected the party would have been able to continue had the gate-climbing not occurred.

"I don't think we would have stopped it unless we'd received complaints of disturbances, which I can't imagine wouldn't have happened," Widmer said of the party, which was scheduled to have DJs spinning past 2 a.m.

However, only one noise complaint was called in, Widmer said. That came in at 11:15 p.m., as the party patrons were being dispersed by officers from three patrol divisions. TPD also had air support and K-9 units in the area in case things devolved into madness, as they did last month when shots were fired in the parking lot of a similarly large party at the Stone Avenue Standard complex.

Widmer said that, despite the large police presence, no force was used in dispersing the crowd. And only one arrest came of the whole night, a single marijuana possession charge.

And though some post-party Facebook comments would suggest otherwise — our favorite: 'Whoever took my car keys, consider yourself shot and dead' — it sounds like #FridayThe15th was considered a success, albeit a short-lived one.

Brown, for one, expects an upswing in leasing inquiries to come from it.

"I think we'll definitely see some positive ... renters from it," she said. "That was the talk."