My bar list

Some time in 2005, I came across a blog from a guy in New York called Dan Freeman. He had retired in his 50s, after he sold his company, and now looked for an activity to fill his days. 

What he came up with was this: he was going to visit 1000 bars in one year. Starting out on New Year’s Day, he marched around New York for the entire year, with occasional excursions to New Jersey and his vacation home in Mexico, in order to reach his goal. He wrote a daily blog about his booze tour and it was very entertaining to read.
His blog is still online, and you can read it here. Content additions are sporadic, the most recent new post is from 2016, but it’s still worth to have a look at it. 

He also did an interview with NBC, which you can read here 

I loved reading his blog and, being somewhat of a bar enthusiast myself, this gave me the idea to do something similar. I realized immediately that I wouldn’t be able to do 1000 in one year, because I wasn’t retired and didn’t have the financial clout to do this full time, but I decided to see how long I could keep it up and where it would go. As it turns out, 15 years on, I’m still going. I have now visited 1507 bars around the world and I’m keeping up with my original target of adding 100 new ones every year. This year, for obvious reasons, it has been slow going, but things will pick up again when travel restrictions are lifted, and I still have plenty of bars in Dublin to visit. Over the years, I have had numerous people ask me if my list was available online somewhere, but it never was. This is why I decided to publish it now for everyone to see, should you be interested.
My rules are as follows: To feature on my list, a place has to sell alcoholic drinks, and you have to be able to drink it right there. For this reason, places like liquor stores and BYOB restaurants don’t count, but restaurants that do sell alcohol do count. There are a number of sporting facilities on the list, based on the fact that they do sell alcohol and you are allowed to drink it there. Also on the list are a number of ferries that have onboard bars, and I have added 2 planes. I intentionally only put 2 planes on the list because otherwise there would have been 200 or so and it would be difficult to keep track of the planes’ ID numbers to make sure that there are no double entries. Finally, a number of bars on the list has since gone out of business, and some have been taken over by other operators or been given different names. I have only entered bars on the list that fall under this category, if there was a significant change in businessplan, and/or the structure of the building. To give you an example: the bar that is now called The BrewDock, is also on the list under its previous name: Kate’s Cottage. Kate’s Cottage was a traditional bar that only sold big brand beers and when it went out of business, it stood empty for a while and then the Galway Bay Brewery took it on and turned it into one of the best craft beer bars in the world. So that counts as a new bar. If the only change is the owner, then it doesn’t count. 

So, having said all this, here is my list. Let me know if you have been in some of them, and what you thought of them!