In Search of the $1 Draft Beer

Real estate prices are in upswing. I’ll bet you a case of Ice House your rent’s gone up in the past three months. It’s been jacked for me and everyone else I know. And with land, so goes the price of everything else: fuel (10 cents higher than the national average), natural gas prices (more than 50 percent higher), and food. They just keep slapping meretricious layers of cost over the region like paint jobs on a stolen Camaro.

That’s why those wallet-busting bar tabs sting. I’m from the Rust Belt, where we fight crippling winters and postindustrial blues with feeding tubes of cut-rate beer. I’ve stanched my own worst hours with soul-boosting trips to cheap dives, where amber waves flow easily, the American spirit in 16 ounces. And let’s face it: If you’re on the losing end of a boom economy, cheap drinks are the only consolation prize.

But South Florida is becoming a 1-percenter playpen. The succor of the working stiff is hard to find. So, like a postrecession Aeneas skiffing over a Mediterranean of booze, looking for a homeland that might exist no more, I decided to set off on a quest for the greatest beer deal of them all — the dollar draft.

Kyle Swenson went on a quest to find $1 draft beers where he lives in South Florida (I have also gone on a similar quest before), and discovered that the rise of brewing costs may make the $1 draft beer bar special a relic of the past (though, impossibly, he does find it).

I don’t know where I can find $1 draft beers near me, though there is seafood restaurant around the corner from me that does $1 oysters for happy hour, and though it’s no $1 draft beer, it’s a small consolation.

Photo: Mark Hillary

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