My New Favorite Bar

I felt like I lived out a movie moment Friday night.

It was to be a low key happy hour at the Hofbrauhaus - Bluegrass Brit and me, some of her friends and her new beau. A calm way to wind down the work week.

But Bluegrass Brit and I never seem to manage anything low key when it comes to socializing.

After trying the seasonal pilsner, the festivities traveled on to her lovely, restored home in Historic Newport. A few of us decided to crack open a bottle of wine to commemorate BB's looming birthday and her recent acquisition of a stunning magnolia tree.

The crowd multiplied, and before we knew it there were about a dozen revelers on the stone patio, enjoying bottle after bottle of wine and orchestrating the celebratory planting of the previously mentioned magnolia.

Several of the guys did all the grunt work (yours truly took the photos of the occasion) and we cheered and toasted Bluegrass Brit as the clock struck midnight, officially marking the start of her 29th year.

And that's about the time someone mentioned an expedition to Jerry's Jug House.

Just the name sounds seedy, doesn't it?

Somehow, we weren't really put off by the bar's moniker. Instead, curiosity flourished and one of the perpetual instigators in the group was just the firecracker we needed to inspire us to lock up the house and head a few blocks north on Overton. We eventually made it to the official hole-in-the-wall, and I was tickled to find a small gathering of people talking about the virtues of Billy Clyde in a room papered in Wildcat logos.

We dropped a few dollars in the juke box and danced around to Johnny Cash, 80s tunes and Janis Joplin, trading dance partners and wailing along to the words as loud as we could. It was funny, looking back on it, our crowd swept in and swirled around like a whirling dervish, downing Jaeger-bombs and Miller High Life. The scene was like something you'd see in an Australian 90s flick - lots of dancing, lots of singing, lots of laughing and lots of drinking.

Jerry's Jug House looks like a combination dive/package store, what with shelf upon shelf of liquor bottles and potato chips, but the people there are as good as gold and the beer is cold.

As quickly as we breezed in to the place, that's how swift we got ourselves together and on the road, destined for Mansion Hill. There, we enjoyed the live rock music and sipped on a few more cold beers and G&Ts before packing it in. I stayed in my South Of The Ohio River Bedroom, forced to pay for the revelry with a splitting headache Saturday morning.

But Jerry's Jug House - I love that place. Can't wait to go back.