About the Quest

My name is Aaron, and this is the story of my quest to drink at every bar on Sixth Street in my hometown of Austin, Texas.

What are you doing?

I'm consuming at least one drink at every single bar along the entire length of Sixth Street from west to east. As of January 2017, that means beginning at Cover 3 and ending at Hops and Grain Brewery. I will try to take it as linearly as possible, just to give a sense of narrative progression, but I might have to skip around a bit as dictated by bar availability, personal scheduling, etc. I will be writing up some notes on the drinks I get as well as the vibes of the bar for my edification and your entertainment.

What counts as a bar? 

This posed profound philosophical problems for me, since the line between "bar" and "place that also serves alcohol" is not very clear. My definition is as follows:

• Must have a Sixth Street address OR be directly accessible from Sixth Street
• Must be able to purchase a drink without any other purchase
• Must be able to consume the drink on-premise.

This naturally includes restaurants, but it does not necessarily include special event venues and the like where you can't just walk in and buy only a drink. I'm going to be as inclusive as possible.

How many bars is that?

If you cast your net widely, you will catch many fish. There are over one hundred alcohol-serving venues along the full length of Sixth Street. Since bars open and close all the time, backtracking to cover whatever opened along the way is a must, in the manner of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged's mission in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to insult everyone in the universe in alphabetical order, except a bit more positive for all concerned.

For the curious, I keep a spreadsheet of all of the known bars here. As far as I know, this is the only list of all bars on Sixth Street that exists anywhere.

What are you ordering?

I'm a big believer in trusting the bar to make me something good - "Dealer's Choice, please" has always worked out well for me. I have fairly broad drinking tastes, and in my experience, asking my server to bring me something that they personally enjoy or recommend has never gone wrong. Asking for whatever a professional thinks is the best drink at their particular establishment and seeing where that takes me, especially with such a wide variety of bars, will yield an extremely diverse and hopefully delicious drink selection.

How fast will you go?

One of the greatest drinking feats I've read about is where two guys drank at every single bar on Western Ave, the longest road in Chicago, in just three days. That's too much for me. Not only am I not that hardcore, there's no way to effectively post about each individual bar I visit along the way after I'm 20 beers in. Visiting two or three bars each night, with one or two drinks per bar, every few days or weeks, is a steady, reasonable pace that ensures the whole street is completed in a few months.

Is it just you?

They say you're never alone with a beer in your hand, but no - my friends are an integral part of this project. Expect drunken group selfies and (hopefully) some guest posts from them as well.

Why?

Because it's there. I'm far from the first person to drink on Sixth Street, but to my knowledge no one has ever deliberately drank at every single bar. Or, if they have, they didn't post about it on the internet, which basically means it never happened, right? There's a real element of pride in being the first person to deliberately accomplish this feat. It's a point of distinction, even if it's it's basically pointless.

Additionally, a project like this is a great way to give some meaning and purpose to a night of bar-hopping with friends. Have you ever had a weekend night where you and your friends are stuck haggling over where to grab a quick beer, trapped between one side of town vs the other, beer selection vs better food, half-priced cocktails vs convenient parking, and so on? This neatly solves every one of those dilemmas in one stroke: just meet at the next bar available on the list, and everyone can join or go off on side-quests as desired.

Plus, it's a great way to explore new things. I have my set of favorite spots, which is fine, but it's nice to shake things up every once in a while and see what's out there. Not only will I hopefully find some cool new places, but I will get to try new drinks that I have never had before. 

Also, more personally to me as a native Austinite, Sixth Street has always been a part of my life. Whether going to the Pecan Street festival in elementary school, watching the ROT Rally in high school, practicing my binge drinking in college bars after I turned 21, or just enjoying lazy afternoons on a patio, I've spent a good chunk of time reaping the benefits of Sixth Street yet never really thinking systematically about its role in the city's culture and economy. Fed Man Walking, a phenomenal Austin food blogger, spent 2015 looking at the city from a food perspective in his 500 Tacos Project, and this is my way of doing something similar for Sixth Street. It has a very interesting history, with many aspects that even natives like myself are unaware of, so whether I'm drinking at a historic venue like the Driskill or the latest speakeasy, I hope to learn more about my own city.

James Joyce once commented to one of his friends about his novel Ulysses:

I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.

I wouldn't pretend that all of Austin could be rebuilt from my notes on this blog... but at least most of one street could!