Reflecting on ridiculous beer specials

Lately I have made some rather large changes to my life in regards to my health and the result thus far has been me dropping nearly 10kg at this point and with plans in the pipe to lose an additional 5. I'll get into how that has been going and how it isn't that difficult if you have the willpower and willingness to make real change in your lifestyle.

I have lived the life of basically a party animal ever since I got the taste for partying around the age of 19 or so and basically I have spent the past nearly 30 years living it up irresponsibly. It really shouldn't be a huge surprise that I gained some weight in that time seeing as how I just basically attacked the beers ever since I was nearly legally allowed to do that.

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Here in Vietnam beer is extremely cheap. It is estimated to be one of the cheapest places in the world for it and it shows. There are some pretty insane beer specials here and I was walking down the street the other day and saw a sign for a place that said "Buy 2 get 4 free" and to me, that is just crazy but it was a promotion by the beer company and I guess they aren't allowed to just give it away or something. I don't think that much thought goes into it.

It got me thinking about some of the rather insane beer specials I have encountered in my years on this planet and most of these crazy specials come from days I spent in college and I thought I'd go down memory lane with you dear reader, if you care to join.

Mug night at Peasants

Peasants was the name of this hippie bar that was in my college town and it wasn't really my scene but I had some friends and a roommate at the time that would frequent the place so I thought, what the hell. On Tuesdays this place would host "mug night" where for $1, you were allowed to fill up any size mug. Of course there were a bunch of people that were trying to take the piss by modifying a pitcher or some absurd container and put a handle on it, but unless you were really out of control, the staff didn't really care and for $1, they would fill up anything.

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This was right around the time that 7-11 started selling these crazy sized coffee mugs or soda mugs for around a dollar as well and these things started to dominate the scene at peasants and these 100 ounce mugs were just insane.

For me, I had a normal sized mug, probably like a pint and a half or something reasonable like that because I do not like warm beer, especially if it is the sort of cheap swill that they are going to be giving you for $1 no matter the size of your mug.

Tuesday was packed at Peasants every week and you only had to pay a cover charge if you arrived after 10pm. I recall me and my roommate being so stingy we would actually drive down to Peasants before 10 to get a stamp on our hands, leave, then come back at 11 when the place started getting busy.

It's funny to me that we sought out crowds in those days. Now I actively avoid them.

penny draft night

This took place at a number of establishments and most of them were the kind of disgusting "bump and grind" music clubs that had there been smartphones at the time, a large amount of us would never be eligible for public office and quite a few of us would end up on the wrong end of a viral video and probably be classified as sex offenders.

The way to get people in the door was that they would let you have unlimited tiny glasses of beer, probably like 200-300 ml, served in a disposable cup, for 1 cent.

You see, they wanted to give the beer away but where I went to college it is illegal for anyone to give away booze for free. Event though this was more than 30 years ago, people don't exactly run around with pennies in their pockets, and the staff are not interested in dolling out 99 cents in change all the time so the solution was that they had a bunch of pennies lying on top of the bar.

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When you went up to the bar to get your definitely NOT FREE beer you were required to slide a penny from one side of the bar to the other. Do it not, and they would not let you have the beer.

It's a funny little thing these trivial laws... because the staff were absolutely insistent on you paying for the beer but kind of turned a blind eye to the fact that basically everyone in the place was underage.

Add unlimited beer to your meal for $1

This happened to me a lot more recently. I was visiting Korea and went to a place where they have hotpot and my girlfriend at the time knew a place that for lunch had a deal that for $1 you could add all you can drink beer to your meal.

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My girlfriend did actually want me to try to hot pot, which she said was amazing... and it was. But the unlimited beer to me sounded like a challenge and even though she was a tiny girl, she could handle her own when it came to drinking as is the case with many Korean women.

We were there for hours. We kept ordering food, just enough to not piss them off too much but after I think the 2 and a half hour mark the manager politely came over and reprimanded us for kind of taking advantage of the establishment. We were not holding up the seats for any other customers or anything like that - I am not that kind of person, but he jokingly told us that most people that get the special will have 2-3 beers, not 20.

We laughed, we paid, we tipped VERY well and were kind of encouraged to never come back there again. hahahahahaaha

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There are a lot of other things that come to my mind as well but I'll just bullet point the others

• Buy 1 get 3 free at Kniepe (Da Nang, Vietnam)
• But a beer get 2 free shots of disgusting local tequila (Chiang Mai, Thailand)
• 25 cent 2-liter draft cup (Alfredo's - Richmond, Virginia)

This is before we even start talking about the beer-drinking contests that were free to enter that likely resulted in injuries. Perhaps I will talk about that at a later time.

It's funny to me that for the most part I don't really even want to drink anymore these days. I went to dinner last night with some friends and this spiraled into drinking an after say my 3rd one, I got "the fear" or what the next day, now today, was going to be like if I continued. I left early, they did not. They are all suffering today and I am not. I guess I just don't want to live that life anymore. The weight loss is just an added bonus I guess.

What about you? Do you have any crazy, but legal, beer specials that you can recall in your life?