Outgrowing the 909 and macro beers

As you may or may not know, I likes me the trivia - specifically, the NTN/Buzztime variety. (If you like NTN/Buzztime trivia, I have a whole blog devoted to it.)

My official home base for NTN/Buzztime is Tequila Hopper's in Upland, and although I play at other places, I like to try to get back there every once in a while. (See my Tequila Hoppers post in this blog, and my several Tequila Hoppers posts in Empoprise-NTN.)

So I was pleased to see that someone else has written about Tequila Hopper's. However, he doesn't look back on the place fondly, for two reasons.

First, it's in the 909.

In my last year or so of undergrad (about 2004-5, just when I started to get into craft beer), my friends and I frequented a place about a mile down the street called Tequilahoppers. After having been to this place weekly for over a year or two span I stopped going. The scene was just not my thing (think 909 bros) and I had moved to LA....

The place is the quintessential 909 sports bar. About 100 tv's, lots of tattoos, waitresses with 5 lbs of silicone in them (yeah!) and lots of Fox Racing or Skin shirts.

Second, he's outgrown the college beer he used to drink.

[T]hey did boast 80 taps, about 50 of which are macro swill. Yeah, seriously, they somehow fill about 50 taps with macro crap. They have about every Michelob, Bud, Coors, and domestic or import fizz water you could ever think of....The picture to the right was taken at one of the Wednesday Bud Light nights a handful of years ago. I didn't know better, lol.

However, the author (Steve) was able to find some Stone IPA on his most recent visit that pleased him.

And Steve said something else that rings true for me, not for Tequila Hoppers, but probably for...everywhere:

Upland is your standard just-outside-of-LA suburb, but it really doesn't have much in the way of beer. We have an English pub a few blocks up with a few good beers on tap but occupied by tons of people you went to high school with and wish to never see again, and a bunch of other really lame dive bars.

His high school comment reminded me of something from my post-bachelor party party. This would have been in 1989, and after my bachelor party was over, a couple of us went to Central and 9th in Upland to get a beer. (I've forgotten what the place was called at the time, but it's been through a couple of name changes in the last 20 years.) I didn't grow up in the area, but the other two guys did; ironically, one of them knew my wife when both of them were in high school. The other one (Danny) grew up in Upland, and looked around the bar as we sat there drinking. After we left, he commented that the people in the bar were the people who graduated from high school, but never really left high school.