Free beer! Must be the start of summer

Ro and I met for margaritas at Rancho's on 88th and Amsterdam because they have the best margs in all of Manhattan AND they're two-for-one during happy hour. I would have discovered them sooner if only I'd have ordered one when I ate there in September 2004 with my parents and great aunt. But I didn't, so I had to wait until my colleague introduced me a while later. Therefore I'm making up for lost time every time I go.

Anyway, Ro had some useful intelligence for us - all the pubs on Amsterdam Avenue between 72nd and 86th Streets were giving out free Amstel Light from 5 - 8 PM! Holy cow. So after our two margs, we headed off down the street to get our free beer. Even though it wasn't particularly warm, there were a lot of people on the street and sitting outside of bars. We stopped into Soldier McGee at 83rd & Amsterdam, which had a pretty rockin' live band doing a wide variety of '70s and '80s covers. The promo girls showed up shortly thereafter with tulips to give away and the crowd suddenly got a lot bigger! We moved on down to the Dead Poet, which had already run out of its allotment of free bottles, so we had to pay for our drinks. But we got to throw our names into the hat for a trip to Amsterdam. Next we crawled on down to Bourbon Street where the Amstels were also gone, so we had some Yuengling as an homage to Ro's great home state.

So all-in-all we only got one free beer, but it was such a great idea that I didn't even care. If I owned some consumer packaged goods company like a brewery, I'd give out free beer once in a while too, just for the fun of it.

More of the same please New York!