Utah’s Bar “Membership” Laws Officially End

mike lewis

• July 02 2009
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Utah’s long standing law requiring people to attain a sponsor, membership, and pay a fee before entering a bar or club to get their drink on, officially came to an end yesterday. The change follows intensive laboring by the the state’s ski industry association and tourism department and is designed to boost tourism and make the state seem less “quirky.”

According to the Associated Press:

“It’s 40 years of oppression come to an end,” said Dave Morris, owner of the bar Piper Down in Salt Lake City. “There’s this national perception that we don’t have bars here, so hopefully this gets out there that we’re open for business.” To celebrate, Morris organized a 16-bar pub crawl to celebrate the novelty of being allowed into a bar without having to pay first. One crawl was set for Wednesday, another with a different lineup of bars was scheduled for Friday.

In Ogden, bartender Rich Miros at Brewskis happily scraped off lettering on the door that said the bar was a private club. The bar gets plenty of tourists from a nearby downtown hotel and skiers coming back from a day at the slopes at nearby Snowbasin. “It’s a great opportunity,” he said of the change to becoming a public bar. “It needed to be changed a long time ago.”

In Salt Lake City, home to the Mormon church, it’s always been different. Kristic and seven of his friends had been to six bars before the pub crawl officially started on Wednesday, spending about an hour at each bar and having waitresses sign T-shirts that said D.U.I — Drinking Utah’s Independence. Many bars referred to Wednesday as Private Club Independence Day.