Lovejoy’s

8/15/2008 11:43:49 AM, friday, august 15, 2008
a great bar to get away... good beers and some interesting music with a cool different vibe... the staff is great too... I always stop at lovejoys when I am even near Austin.. Keep Austin Weird, Lovejoys must have started that....

6/12/2008 7:49:53 PM, thursday, june 12, 2008
Love the ambiance! A great place to escape the college kids on 6th street - just shifty-looking enough from the outside that most people would pass it up... that’s what I love about it. Great patrons, great staff, laid back, friendly environment. Short lines at the bar. I always enjoy stopping by Lovejoys while in the neighborhood, and it’s not hard to convince friends to come with. Oh, and they sell cheap growlers to bring home their house brews. Not too incredibly impressed with their house beers, but they have a few that are pretty good.

5/9/2008 7:07:33 PM, friday, may 09, 2008
My friends and I enjoyed our quick stop at Lovejoy’s. Can’t get more casual, more like grunge, than this. Bartenders were real nice and walked us through some of the different selections. Great prices. Most expensive was Bro Theleonius at $4. House $2, others $3. Good selection overall. Wasn’t super impressed on the house brews but take them for what they are. Was there on a Monday night so it was slow. I can imagine on busy weekends it’s full of a younger crowd. I would return without hesitation.

4/6/2008 8:56:28 AM, sunday, april 06, 2008
(Personal note- this place looks and feels EXACTLY like a bar I frequented when I lived back in Michigan- talk about deja vu). After traversing the drink 3 beers and puke fratboy wasteland know as 6th street on a Saturday night, my wife and cousin both said,Hey, what’s Lovejoy’s? I saw it and made a b-line for it. Ambiance- beat to hell booths and chairs with fine various graffiti on the walls, music is nothing top 40 at 120 dB, which is fine by me. Selection- 4 house brews on tap (had a stout and IPA, great, but lost my rating sheet for the evening so no ratings this time) for 2.50 a pint, with other guest beers on tap, roughly 30 bottles. Service- great. Bartender was very friendly, kind of looked like DAC in this younger days, and liberally eyeballed mix drinks for my wife and cousin. Side note- you can smoke at your own risk here- while management won’t ask you to put it out due to the Nazi smoking ban in Austin, if you get caught while it’s being enforced by the city, you and the place both get into trouble from what the bartender told me. I just went outside as a matter of respect. Overall- very biker/rockabilly joint, didn’t let me down personally. While it’s not for the lamestream, don’t judge a book by it’s cover- rough around the edges but friendly people who just want to have a good time on the inside. I’ll be back again, and again, and again...

5/14/2007 10:29:15 PM, monday, may 14, 2007 [ Updated monday, may 14, 2007 ]
I love Lovejoy’s. Dark and secluded behind black plexi-glass. A mix of punkers and hippies makes this quite the place for Austin brewhounds. Keeping Austin beers weird, y’know?!Four homebrews generally on tap. Fun names like ’Folsom Prison Blueberry Porter,’ ’Hyper Atlas Espresso Stout,’ ’Dennis Hopper IPA,’ and ’Amber Waves of Pain.’ Other Austin, Texas, and national brews on tap. Tons of bottles. Join the Order of the Fez: they keep a scorecard as you drink 100 beers in a year and get your name on a plaque. Amazing jukebox - from Johnny Cash and Lead Belly to Fugazi and Modest Mouse. Nice beers, heavy pour on mixed drinks. Art pieces on display fairly often. Cool place to get away from the 6th Street Party Kid vibe. Most Suggested: Old Vixen Barleywine, Jenn’s Addiction Barleywine

2/1/2007 7:47:39 PM, thursday, february 01, 2007
Based on some rather polarizing comments that I read on this site, I knew I wanted to visit Lovejoy’s Taproom, but I wasn’t sure if I’d like it. The sort of campy decor didn’t appeal to me and I was pretty unimpressed by the Lovejoy’s-brewed beer I tried. Decor was that of your friend’s unfinished basement. There were some pretty beat-up tables and chairs, and a couple of ripped up booths. Clientele was a 20-ish hipster rockabilly crowd, that seems associated with a good number of craft beer haunts (like Stonefly/Onopa in Milwaukee) but who seem to drink mostly retro-"lost" beers like Pabst/Schlitz/Hamm’s/Blatz (and in Texas, Lone Star). There were only three house-brewed beers on tap: Dr. Shock IPA (reviewed separately), another ale (my friend had this - it seemed much more like an IPA than my IPA did), and a porter that neither of us tried. In addition to this, there were a few other craft beers on tap (Fireman #4), but the hipster crowd appeared to be drinking mostly Lone Star bottles. I tried the Dr. Shock, and I thought it very marginal. My friend had their special ale, which I thought was rather good when I took a sip. So I’m not sure what to take away from the quality of the beer, but I think the "thumbs down" on the IPA was severe enough to outweigh the weak "thumbs up" on the special ale when considering beer quality at Lovejoy’s.

12/9/2005 12:45:23 PM, friday, december 09, 2005
Enjoy while it lasts. According to an interview in the Austin Chronicle, Lovejoy’s will close following SXSW 2006 due to declining business exacerbated by the recent smoking ban. As one glance will quickly tell you, Lovejoy’s isn’t so much a traditional idea of a brewpub so much as a punk/biker/hippie hangout that just happens to make it’s own beer. On your way to the restrooms be sure and check out the great anti-corporate non-conformist screed painted on the hallway wall. They have a carefully selected range of micro taps as well (I’ve had the pleasure of a Delirium Tremens draft there before) but these beers tend to be standard import/US micro prices (I think the DT was $6). House beers are usually around $2.50 a pint. Ultimately, if you decide to venture in to Lovejoy’s, do it because you’re in search of that legendary Austin funk and not because you’re trying to cover all the city’s brewpub bases. It really is kind of a love-it-or-hate-it kind of place: I’ve taken people in who instantly fell in love with the joint, and I’ve taken people in who wore a big scowl on their face the entire time we were there, the latter often using the mediocrity of the non-rotating brews as an excuse to leave before they got halfway through their pint.

7/15/2005 9:46:35 PM, friday, july 15, 2005
This place is pretty funky. The first time I went in there, I felt like I was maybe going to see a heroin deal go down or something. There are some interesting characters in here. Kind of punky/hippy, etc. Strange tattoos to say the least. Once you get past that, though, this place can grow on you pretty fast. The people, albeit different, are quite friendly. The beer selection is pretty decent and they have some of their own beers on draft, which I like. I generally find the prices to be surprisingly nice. Two pool tables. Sometimes kinda hard to get to the bar, especially if you look really normal.

6/11/2005 4:46:15 PM, saturday, june 11, 2005
I accidentally found this hole in the wall...and was not better off after that...very hippie-esque atmosphere with less than mediocre beers...

2/22/2005 9:52:11 AM, tuesday, february 22, 2005
A smoky hippy bar and lounge. The house brew was pretty poor, and the crowd were pretentious college art students with bad taste. Everyone kept ordering bottles of Lone State when they had better guest taps. Oh well.