DENVER DIVES: The Dirty Duck @ Evans and Dahlia

If you’re like us, you hate long lines leading into a bar and cover charges on top of an already expensive tab you’re sure to accumulate in an honest night’s drinking. Shitty electronica played insanely loud only enrages you more as you push through the crowd to reach a bartender, and then there’s the long time it takes to get a beer when there’s plenty of hot girls that will obviously be served before you.

So you opt for the dives, or if you haven’t, maybe you will after we take you through inside tours of some of the best dives in Denver to buy a drink. Places where the beer is cheap and there aren’t many on tap, or where you might hear a decent live jazz group instead of 50 Cent’s recent suck-ass single blasting on club speakers, and the kind of place where degenerate colorful people get their buzz going.

The first place to be featured in Denver Dives is The Dirty Duck (4780 E Evans Ave), where its non-central location blocks away from Colorado and Evans means overcrowding probably won’t ever be an issue in this bar’s shed-like confines. Here you’re not going to face the crushing realization of your self-worth when a crowd full of attractive men or women (according to your preference) collectively ignore you. Instead of full-chested, youthful ladies who only pay attention to you if you buy them several cranberry-vodka mixed drinks, you get saggy-bosomed, life-drained women who might have enough heart left in ‘em to fuck you for a Keystone Light. As for the men, well, the guys operate the same as anywhere else: drunk and trying to impress any “fives” or above with small talk or drinks, but at least they’re too old to pop their collars, and that can only be a good thing.

Most of our staff can be said to frequent this dive quite often, which is why it’s our first featured bar. In fact, I pre-gamed there for my twenty-first birthday before going downtown, so it’s probably the first bar I went to with a legal ID. There’s two pool tables in the back that aren’t always crowded with douchebags, an Internet jukebox which isn’t necessarily a good thing since I doubt the owners would have ever added a Gwen Stefani solo album otherwise, and a sorta-big-screen TV for watching sports or, uh, news about sports. I can’t speak for their pizza, but the burgers are good, though everything tastes better after several beers. What’s most impressive about their food offerings is when they won’t offer it to you; if it’s a busy night, or if they don’t feel like it, they’ll tell you to go to hell after you try to place an order. Most of the crowd there are of the older sort, as mentioned above, but there’s something to be said for them in ways of age and maturity: instead of being loud-mouthed college students trying to impress each other or girls, they just drink until they get fucked up.

There’s plenty of times we’ve seen men twice our age falling into our booths on their way out and we’ve pointed to each other and said, “That’s you in thirty years.” So on top of getting a cheap pitcher, you also learn first-hand a valuable lesson, which is that you’re never too old to make an ass of yourself.

But hey, at least at The Dirty Duck they won’t stop serving you if they think you’ve had too much. Hell, they might not even card you if you’re underage.