#81: Two Bucks

The Bar

Two Bucks. 503 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78701

Visited 5/3/17 @ 8:30pm.

The Drink

Whiskey sour. Jim Beam, simple syrup, Peychaud bitters, egg white, lime juice. $9.

An excellent whiskey sour! The bitters might not be standard in a whiskey sour, nor the substitution of lemon juice for lime, but everything else about it was pretty by-the-book. There are lots of drinks that I enjoy but rarely order, and a whiskey sour is one of them. I love whiskey, but for some reason I don't usually think to get a whiskey sour specifically; maybe the siren song of the very similar Old Fashioned is just too powerful. I had thought that the Old Fashioned was the oldest known cocktail, but evidently that is in dispute. Regardless, Two Bucks' version is excellent, everything you could want in a sipping cocktail. They have a number of other great cocktails as well; judging from my samples of everyone else's drinks, there wasn't a misfire among them. I can imagine that the more complex drinks might not advisable orders during the Friday night crush, but even with a small crowd on a Wednesday, they came out fast, strong, and well-crafted.

The Crew

Chris, Louis, Kyle, Cristy, Travis, Hannah, Aaron, Karen.

Notes

The blaring pop punk riffs of the classic 1999 Lit single My Own Worst Enemy greeted me as I walked into the bar, and I instantly felt at home. Curated by the bartender himself, a lengthy playlist of all of the songs you remember from FM radio during high school around the turn of the millennium accompanied us all the way through our visit, and it couldn't have been better-chosen. I'll readily admit that I can be pandered to, and almost nothing puts a smile on my face faster than the choppy operaticisms of Serj Tankian blasting out of the speakers. Two Bucks is the sister bar of Buckshot, which we had just come from, and it had been open for less than two months as of our visit. You wouldn't have known that by the number of people there, though, and while I wouldn't credit the awesome music for all of the crowd milling around, it surely didn't hurt.

Almost more appreciated than the music, though, was the fact that this was about the most laid-back craft cocktail bar I've ever been to. You're not going to see drink wheels at Midnight Cowboy, for example, and this place has four different drink wheels - one each for beer, shots, and cocktails, and then a special birthday wheel where each spin is $10. You won't see a giant Jim Beam-branded plinko board either, which takes up a whole chunk of wall in the back and offers a great way to spend a few minutes challenging your drunk friends to games of. I like the calm atmosphere of your standard craft cocktail bar, which gives you a place to concentrate on your drink and your conversation, and basically make you feel like a higher class of person. But it turns out that you can have your two-dollar-sign-on-Yelp cocktails in a more proletarian setting as well without losing anything. We barely even glanced at at HOU @ SAS during our visit, having a blast as we were, and moved on only with reluctance.