Thing 230 The Inaugural Pint

I'm fond of a pint. This is not surprising to anyone who knows me, or anyone who reads this regularly (I think there are people who read this regularly, I can't be sure). For anyone else, well it's hardly a stunning revelation. Would make a funny headline though: Local Twenty Something Admits To Enjoying Pint... I've got a pecking order for bars too, but most of the bars that I like, have been around for donkey's years. In the case of two of them, my grandad was a regular drinker there in his thirties, that'll tell you how far back we're going.

I tend not to like the new fangled bars, with their fancy interiors and expensive looking glasses. I believe the technical expression is "fancy schmancy". I like a bar that doesn't make you feel under-dressed if you walk in there in a pair of jeans and a hoodie. So when the new places open up, I tend to be underwhelmed by their appeal.

Enter: Cobblestone Joe's.

Dell Dar is a buddy of mine. Nice chap. Himself and his brother decided that they want to laugh in the face of recession, and stick two proverbial fingers up at economic downturns. Such trifling matters are of little consequence, and they decided to open a bar. They took an old lot, just around the corner from O'Connell's, right in the centre of Limerick, and they gutted it, built it again, fixed this and that and patched up the other and made a bar out of it.

It's not like the other new bars. It looks like an old bar, and it has a neat little fire, and a large heated smoking area. These are things I appreciate in a bar. But none of that's important. What is crucial is what they decided to do for The Project...

Like I say, this wasn't a bar before, ever. It was an empty lot. So brand new taps. Never before had Arthur's finest creation graced a harp-emblazoned pint glass in this establishment. Hours before they opened their doors to any other customers, and before even a single test pint had been pulled Dell Dar called me in. With the tools still lying around, and wood chips still on the floor, he took a new glass and pulled Cobblestone Joe's first ever pint. And handed it to me.

First things first: Free pint. Yahoo.

Secondly: Guinness. Yahoo.

There's popular myth that does the rounds about Guinness, and beer in general. It goes like this: the first pint, or the last pint (depending on who you're talking to) are always bad pints. This is untrue. Once upon a day, when drink came in wooden barrels, maybe this was true. Modern booze tastes the same from the first to the last drop.

Where Guinness does taste muck, is in bars where it's been sitting in the line. So typically the first pint or two on any given day are not going to be good ones. It's because since the end of service the night before, the drink's been sitting in the lines just at the tap, not in the keg. That's not a problem for this Thing - since the line had never been used before.

So to answer the question of whether or not it was a good pint, I provide the following picture as evidence...
Yum Yum.

Like I say, it's a lovely little bar. I'm sure it'll stand the test of time, and if it does, then in years to come, I'll be able to pop in and say to myself (smugly), that before anyone ever had a drink there - I did it first.

P.S. If you're in Limerick any time, and looking for the bar, Cobblestone Joe's can be found on Little Ellen Street, right on the corner... Tell them I sent you. Or don't. I don't mind.