BREW

Masters of Brewtality’s Guide to Getting Lumberjacked Up

Welcome back to another devilishly delightful edition of America’s number one occult-themed craft beer column: Masters of Brewtality! We’re America’s only occult-themed craft beer column so rising to the top of that specific cesspool was as difficult as sitting up.This month,boils and ghouls, we’re running a special welcome back to our beloved collegiate population,whose youthful livers keep the bar lights on during the frigid Flagstaff winters.And,make no mistake,dear reader,their livers are among the best on the market.So much so,the freaks and geeks that populate the MOB crypt have a special arrangement with multiple booze dispensing institutions for first dibs any time someone acts out of line,so remember to conduct yourself with respect and decency when patronizing the local establishments. But,without further ado and in no particular order,here’s the Masters of Brewtality’s Guide to Getting Lumberjacked Up!

The Mayor: Located just north of campus in the booze-soaked heart of Flagstaff’s ever-ready-to-party south side neighborhood, the Mayor is as classic of a college bar as you can get. Rooftop dance parties, tons of games and drink specials so depraved, it’d put Andre the Giant down for a booze nap. Let’s start with the morning drink specials because it’s a well-known fact you can’t drink all day if you don’t start off right away. Brunch runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday with a full breakfast menu and, while we’re a beer column, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention their food. The Cha-Cha-Changa is probably one of the most hedonistic dishes in town right now and will fortify your stomach as you prepare yourself for a drinking marathon. Take a little pro advice and pair that insane chimichanga with one of their 96oz mimosa towers. It’s $36 for two bottles of champagne and orange juice, making it one of the best deals in town. Perhaps wisely, they only serve it to parties of three or more, but that’s still not bad! They’ve also managed to take the dorm room staple of pizza rolls and shoot it into the next dimension. People are obsessed with these. Great Happy Hour and Power Hour specials, too!

Collin’s: Collin’s has been the most popular college bar in Flagstaff since we can remember, and our collective memory here in the MOB crypt goes all the way back to 2002. It’s packed shoulder to shoulder every weekend with thirsty club goers, the music is easily heard, the game room is well stocked, and the drink specials are reasonable enough for even the most impoverished English Lit major to catch a buzz. Saturdays and Sundays feature an insane, bottomless Bloody Mary and Mimosa deal for $29.95 a la carte and $19.95 with food, and they’ve got killer happy hour and reverse happy hour deals all week long. There’s a two-forone on domestics and wells on Friday, too! We’re going to recommend their burger if you’re looking to sop up the booze and, being one of the most television-laden sports bars in town, they’ve always got a game on.

SouthsideTavern: Always a prime first stop for any downtown pub crawl,Southside is just the right blend of hip and dive.Here in the Masters of Brewtality crypt,we’re always on board with a raging bonfire and,while Southside may not have exactly that,they do run fire pits on the nightly which is close enough.Plus,there’s a swing seat,which we think might be the only one in Flagstaff.There is nothing better than drinking in a moving seat as it adds just enough momentum to make you feel like you’ve doubled your night’s intake with a whisper of danger.Southside is also doing an awesome Service Industry Appreciation Night on Mondays for any member of Flagstaff’s workforce.We’re not sure exactly what being part of the city’s workforce entails,but we’re hoping“craft beer column staff member and amateur organ harvester” counts enough to get in on the $3 beers,$4 wells and $5 calls.Southside also recently

opened a sister tavern on the corner of Route 66 and San Fran,appropriately named The Corner Tavern,right where Marjerle’s used to be.They’ve found a formula that works with the first,so go knock them back! Gopher Hole: Once a Prohibition-era speakeasy, like pretty much every building in downtown Flagstaff, this cozy basement bar is home to not only killer drink specials, but also one of the most prolific populations of ghosts in the city. The Weatherford Hotel boasts at least three regularly sighted apparitions AND frequent paranormal manifestations! Great food, extensive list of cocktails Mike and craft beer are all on hand every night. Williams The game room is one of the best, as well, with darts, ping pong and pool tables, but, as we said before, we’re into fire and their fireplace runs hot during the winter months. The Gopher Hole features nightly drink specials during happy hour and reverse happy hour, too! This place is worth checking out for the history and décor alone, but head upstairs and check out the other bars as well. The balcony view is breathtaking! Chili’s: We’ve got a weird thing for Chili’s. Go there and you might develop one, too. Of course, this is just the start of your journey through Flag’s incredible nightlife. One of the the best bits of advice we’ve ever gotten came from what looked like a grizzled Rio De Flag bridge troll that told us to never drink at the same spot twice until we’ve tried all of them once. So, treat it like Pokémon and catch ‘em all! That’s all for this month, boils and ghouls, be safe and party hard!

JAKE BACON

Tequila Sunrise participants line up waiting to get into Collin’s Irish Pub downtown Flagstaff.

SVEA CONRAD

The Gopher Hole is tucked away in the basement of the iconic Weatherford Hotel.

Mike Williams (your titular Master of Brewtality) is a humble tattoo artist, egotistical writer, relentless beer drinker, unrepentant Hellraiser and connoisseur of all things Doom Metal. You can find him slinging ink at Flagstaff Tattoo Company or at some bar downtown.

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Nicole’s Impossibly Possible Ideas

A wormhole summer

It was precisely 97 minutes ago that we wrapped up Spring Semester 2022. By the time you’re reading this, it will be September 1 and Fall Semester 2022 will be well underway. They say there’s this thing called summer, but like a wormhole, it’s really just a fold in the space-time continuum. You blink and then you’re already there.

I used to hold this idea of summer like Ray Bradbury does in “Dandelion Wine” . It’s a fantasy of a time that may have never really existed, like some conservatives imagine the 50s, for example—a time when things were simpler if you were a white male with a house, car and a pension. But still, like that idea of the white American Dream, the dream of summer persists. Porches. Lemonade. The smell of a freshly mown lawn. Swimming pools or even more romantic, swimming holes in rivers not so cold they take your breath away. Or even rivers that do.

In May, I set out scheming. Flagstaff’s summer joys are usually abundant. Music in the park. Hullabaloo. Movies on the Square. Even fireworks—if the fire danger isn’t too high—at the golf course. Before Covid, Erik, the kids and I could knock one event a week, sometimes two. We would have friends over for barbecues and sit in the backyard around a propane fire if the fire danger was high and a real fire if the monsoon storms had come.

I suppose some people think that summer is a great time to travel, but I am here to tell you it is not. If you leave Flagstaff, especially early in the summer, the wormhole will engulf you, and you will inevitably miss Hullabaloo. You won’t get in the rhythm of music in the park or movies on the square. You’ll miss shows at the Orpheum or the Amphitheater. I recommend that you save any travel until the week before FUSD schools start when Flagstaff summer already has wound itself up.

And, to avoid more wormhole maleficence, I also recommend not letting your children age. Music in the park is not the same if your kids are not begging you for money to get their face painted or to buy a glow-in-the-sun colored SpongeBob SquarePants ice cream concoction. By letting your children age, you risk them going to movies in the square with their friends, which means your main job is to drive them. Sure, watch the movie on your own, dear parent. See how sitting on the stairs without your special chair because the kids ‘need’ them, and their friend forgot their own.

This summer had its special circumstance. There’s still trepidation about gathering even though most people seem to have surmounted that trepidation and taken themselves to concerts where they danced so hard that the mosh pit followed them and knocked them over and they broke their wrist, impeding their dreams of paddleboarding and of taken surf lessons during the vacation to San Diego they shouldn’t have booked because then they would miss Hullaballoo.

But perhaps, you didn’t break your wrist. Perhaps, instead, you suffered deeper, more troubling damage by the Tunnel Fire or the Pipeline Fire. Perhaps, you refused to go outside because the wind blew so strong that you could imagine the fire sweeping over that mountain, up that hill, around that bend. You might be able to trust fire, but you know you cannot trust wind. Maybe it was too windy for Hullaballoo for you. Maybe too windy at the park. Even too windy at the square. Maybe you didn’t want to leave your neighborhood. Everything seemed dangerous. Two pine needles blown together might conspire to ignite each other. Wind plus a super dry spring plus the diminishing amount of snow plus warmer temperatures due to climate change may make you prefer to stand in your front yard, garden hose in hand, than watch Aladdin for the 25th time or leave town when a spark might blossom into a fullfledged wild fire.

Maybe you kept watching the skies. What did 80 mph winds in June portend? Is this the time to leave town? Possibly, it was your only chance because July hit and so did the rain, and thus, the floods. Now, instead of garden hose in hand, you stood in your front yard layering sandbags against the foundation of your house. Perhaps this is not a good time to travel either.

You may not be able to swim because the lifeguards will close the pool for lightning, and it’s hard to watch a movie in the square while sitting underneath an umbrella.

It has rained over seven inches at my house, and although I’m not in path of flooding, I’ve seen the reinforcements around town. It’s like we’re trying to hold the mountain up with our smaller, plas-

tic sand-mountains. I hate the damage the rain has done, but I so appreciate the storms—we needed rain so badly. Which leads me to my this-isn’t-reallya-traceable-river-bed point that the summer has been strange but also strangely abundant. I started my tomatoes earlier than it was recommended, covered them at night, and got a tomato about a month earlier than I ever have before. My peas kept growing because the sun has been well-mitigated by monsoon clouds. Erik and I went mushroom hunting and found gigantic puffballs the size of our heads, a flying agaric/amanita muscaria that I know not to eat and some boletes that are special to Arizona and New Mexico. My wildflowers are fighting each other for air space. I typed thousands of words and proofed Nicole hundreds of pages. I saw my friends at least Walker once a week, even if we couldn’t barbecue because the grill does not light so well in the rain forest in which I now live. Summer is always too little because it’s always too much. Not everything can squeeze into the space of nostalgia, travel plans, parties and city fun. You can pickle your cukes and put up your cherries, but you might miss peach season because it’s not that summer is over. But, that summer—that dream of abundance—should last all year long, and the point of a wormhole is that you pack a lot of stuff inside it, even if it’s over in an instant.

Nicole Walker is the author of seven books, most recently ProcessedMeats: Essays on Food, Flesh, andNavigating Disaster. She teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. The words here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of her employer.