Mia’s Lounge

No Longer In Business

An interesting place. Just up the street from Tinderbox. Kind of a divey bar and they also have a small bottle shop area off to the side.

They had a band playing and the place was pretty packed. It’s a big bar, too. Some pool tables off to the side, a decent amount of bar seating and plenty of high tops for the standing crowd. They also seem to allow dogs to just run around in here. Cool, I guess?

The beer selection is pretty pedestrian, I thought. Probably at least a third of the taps are taken up by typical stuff like the macros (Coors Light, for instance), Angry Orchard, Guinness, a core Stone beer...but they did have a few local beers and maybe a Bells tap or two. The bottled selection is pretty typical of any decent enough shop like a BevMo. That is, big name brands for the most part, particularly when it comes to imports it’s almost all the household name Belgian beers.

It’s a cool place to hang out and they have cheap drinks, so it would be a good spot to just go out to, but not my first choice for beer.

I remember this place. Grimy bar, Tempe Whole Foods bottled beer selection. Though, there’s something alluring about Mia’s. Could it be the vibe? How it was really hard to see your hands in front of your face? The colorful barflies you encountered when you left your seat to take a piss? Yes - all of these. Sometimes you just need to go with it.

Just south of Route 66 in the old downtown area of Flagstaff and within easy walking distance of most places within the city. As you enter there is a beer shop to your left, straight on is the dark/black interior of this low barroom. A stage is in the far right corner, there is a posh wine bar behind the regular bar to the rear left and a patio area out the back. Find your own way to the toilets. Plenty of pulls and a beer list that interested me, but might not a US based BA? This was a Saturday afternoon in May 2010, bright outside, dark in here. Five other customers and a barmaid who didn’t have a clue, luckily one of the regulars was a beer geek and we had a good chat about beer in general (he recommended The Greenroom, which turned out a good call). A party came in wanting five different German alcoholic drinks (for some drinking game they were playing), the barmaid was completely lost, I noticed the Beck’s in her fridge, so that was one (she had no idea it was German), she wanted to give them a Grolsch, but I explained that was Dutch, Jagermeister she found herself. The local beer geek knew she had a bock somewhere, so she located one of those. A honey based snaps was russelled up and I have no idea what the final drink was, but the barmaid was being led by her customers and everyone seemed to be having a good time thinking of German drinks. Anyway, my beers ($1.00 off all taps) started with a bottle of Turbodog (Abita, Louisiana) and finished with a SKA Pinestrip Red Ale, via a Deuschutes Hop Henge. All seemed fine to me, but I’ve never had them before, so who knows if they were top notch or not? It was warm and sunny outside and we had other bars to find, so we left for more elsewhere. Friendly enough, a bit quiet before and after the German interlude. It did seem a night time sort of place, but we didn’t return to check it out.

visited 7/6/10. oddly converted grimy strip club (we sat next to the old dj stand!) with a bunch of taps and a few decent bottles to go. had to go to the bar to order a drink even though there were two people working and we were the only peeps not at the bar.

Very big place with quite a few taps, and when I was there they were all imports.

Mia’s is one of the better bars in Flagstaff, with lots of great beers on tap. They’re bottle shop is small, but they definitely make good use of their space. They stock a lot of six-packs that you can get just about anywhere else in town, but their selection of bombers is pretty top notch. I believe they might be the only place in Flagstaff that regularly stocks Rouge’s Old Crustacean. Honestly, the only negative aspect to the place is how click-ish the environment is. Unless you dress and talk the scene with your best friend working behind the counter, you’ll likely feel out of place. If you’ve never been, it’s definitely worth the visit.