Power Ranking College Bar Specials

ArrowZeppelin8 years ago

One of the hallmarks of any good campus bar scene is the specials each bar offers to incentivize students to get out and drink excessively on weeknights and happy hour, as if they need any additional encouragement to do that. You might see some slight variations from campus to campus, but for the most part, almost every college town features a lot of the same specials on different nights of of the week.

However, not all bar specials are created equal. Let’s go through and power rank of some of the better and more common bar specials you’re bound to see when you hit the town on any given weeknight.

6. Take-Home Logo Glass Night

These usually start off with the first drink being somewhat expensive with each ensuing refill costing much less. You also get to take the glass home, as the name implies, which makes for a neat souvenir and serves as a crucial addition to your glassware collection. Sometimes they’ll even give you a boot or huge glass stein that you can repeatedly bring back and fill up for cheap, which is great because drinking out of oversized and ridiculous-looking drinking vessels is fun. The one drawback here is that you run the risk of not making it home with the glass due to your drunk ass forgetting it at the bar or dropping it on the way home. But if you can make it back with the thing in tow, it’s worth the effort.

5. Half-Off Fish Bowls

Despite their girly reputation, fish bowls are a sockdolager of a drink. And deep down, you know you love to drink those sugary, fruity girl drinks that can knock you on your ass in no time. There’s great value to be found in fish bowls if there’s a place on campus that has them on special for around $5 each. For that price, you’ll be hard pressed to beat how much alcohol you’re getting with one drink. The bartender may tell you that you’re supposed to split a bowl with multiple people, but that’s for pussies. Round up some of your buddies, order one for each of you, and have a race to see who can finish theirs fastest. It’s a fun way to black out in like half an hour.

4. Wine Night

Admittedly, I cannot speak to the ubiquity of this particular special. It’s a popular one at the bar Cly’s at the University of Illinois, but I don’t know how many other campuses have it. Still, it’s a hilarious promotion and one that deserves a mention. The bar sells whole bottles of wine for about the same price as you can get it in stores, and you can carry the bottle with you like you’re walking around a nightclub with Dom Perignon. The bartenders give you a stack of cups with each bottle under the pretense that you’ll split it with others, but we all know that’s a charade. Girls flock to wine night in droves to quench their inherent feminine thirst for fermented grapes, and guys follow suit because they want to have sex with those girls, If you can find a place that has it, it’s definitely worth checking out.

3. Beer Tubes

I’m a big fan of ordering alcohol in large quantities meant for multiple people and drinking it on your own, and the beer tube is my favorite method of doing so. Measuring in at 100 oz, beer tubes are beasts and often one of the best values you can get at the bar. Most people would advise splitting a tube just for the purpose that you might not be able to finish it off before the beer gets warm, but that shouldn’t be a problem so long as you’re not being a little bitch.

2. $2 U Call It/$1 Beer

These are college bar classics that I can’t not rank near the top. If there isn’t a bar at your school that offers these specials, then I don’t even consider it to be a real college. You will be hard-pressed to find a deal like this anywhere once you’re out of college, especially if you move away to a big city, so take advantage of this deal while you can.

1. Free Drinks From Your Buddy Who Works at the Bar

You know what’s better than cheap drinks? Free ones. If one of your friends works at a bar, you better be taking advantage of that benefit for all its worth. Even if they’re just lowly bar backs or kitchen workers, they should still be pulling strings to give you and your boys the free drinks you rightfully deserve. What good are friends for unless you stand to personally gain from them in some fashion anyway? Connections at the bar: a TFM as old as time..

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