#70: The Library

The Bar

The Library. 407 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78701

Visited 4/8/17 @ 1am.

The Drink

Pickleback shot. Jameson, pickle juice. $10.

$10 is a steep price for any shot, let alone one that's half pickle juice, the cost of which can't be more than a few pennies. It's especially galling coming from a bar that used to be as cheap as The Library was back in the day. However, yet again I can't fault the bar or claim ignorance: if you're a bartender on a Friday night, when some guy comes up to you and asks you some involved question about a drink showing off the bar with his three friends in tow, are you going to neglect the other patrons and spend 5 minutes crafting some complex cocktail that the rest of the gang may not even like, or are you going to go for the most quickest and high-margin drink you can make? Well, the joke's on them, because I actually love picklebacks. I don't care if it smacks of "I'm a poor college student and all I have in my dorm room fridge is a bottle of whiskey and a jar of pickles". Whiskey's great, of course, but I sincerely love pickle juice: I savored it when I was a kid getting pickles at school lunch, it's surprisingly versatile in food contexts, and as a chaser it's great at eliminating those infamous post-shot "whiskey shivers" your body produces as it attempts to recover from the great wrong you have just visited upon it. I'll still chafe at the price, since this is essentially just a $10 shot of Jameson, but the combination itself is a classic.

The Crew

Karen, Cecilia, Travis, Aaron.

Notes

I went to The Library a lot when I was in college. One of the traits which set it apart from the zillion other Dirty Sixth bars it sits near, which guaranteed it an affectionate spot in the night's rotation, was that it was cheap. Like, "I ordered 7 beers and still haven't hit the $10 credit card minimum" cheap. Traditions are very important to people, even or perhaps especially for college students, and so I can't count the number of G&Ts I ritualistically inhaled on the ground floor or up on the balcony level while all our troubles drained into oblivion, accompanied by really loud music. They're not as cheap now, which is a tragedy and impetus for a bookshelf of Why I Hate Austin Changing thinkpieces in itself, but ironically the only visible change from a decade ago is that instead of the books cut in half on the shelves behind the bar, there are now only flatscreen TVs. Perhaps the replacement of books by television could be interpreted as a subtle metaphor for society's embrace of superficial discourse, or a veiled protest against cost overruns at Austin's always-almost-finished new downtown library. Or maybe they realized that drunk people whose attempts to hit on the person next to them failed would be more readily pacified by those annoying Chive TV feeds showing YouTube compilations than a bunch of unreadable half-books gathering dust on the shelf. The Library is not a place for literacy.