A night out with Bar Mom
A night out with Bar Mom
Touring Colorado Springs’ cocktail scene with its unlikely matriarch
It’s a Wednesday night in early July and I’m doing Sally’s rounds with her — dropping into a series of cocktail bars downtown for a drink at each. Sally is Sally Wood, affectionately known as “Bar Mom” to many in the cocktail industry. If you don’t know her, you’re probably not drinking in the right places.
She’s 64, but rents a room in her house to the Archives’ Shayne Baldwin, one of the top-awarded bartenders in town, 35 years her junior. She goes to concerts with the crew. Jack White with Eleven18’s Jacob Pfund. U2 at the Sphere in Las Vegas with Tony’s bartender Luis Rodriguez, who she also went on a Jay and Silent Bob cruise with last year. She’s the guest of honor at Friendsgivings. She’s cool AF, with the cocktail tattoos to prove it. She’s adored.
“Sally isn’t obligatory,” Jacob tells me over a drink at Shame & Regret. “It’s not charity. She’s someone we genuinely want to spend time with. We truly love her and she loves us.” He says all bartenders attract some bar flies who they appreciate seeing regularly, but usually the relationship ends there. Those are more surface-level interactions. But not with Sally. The time spent across the counter from one another is just “the gateway to who she is,” he says, recalling he first met her when he was working at Sakura many years ago, but didn’t really get to know her until he mixed drinks at The Archives for a stint.
Emily Kindt is behind the bar this night at Shame, and greets Sally with a warm, sincere smile, before mixing her a cucumber vodka and Pimm’s No. 1 gin liqueur drink named The Will to Live on the current cocktail list. Sally has made Shame a regular destination to see owner Matt Baumgartner, who she’s known since his Rabbit Hole days. When Sally enters a bar, she gets hugs and kisses too from her bartender friends. She often chats with other regulars along the bar rail, and sometimes new faces, telling them about her favorite spots in town if they’re new or visiting.
When doing her rounds, a few nights a week on average, she’ll typically hit three or four bars over the course of as many hours, Ubering downtown from Gold Hill Mesa around 6 p.m. or so and heading home around 10 p.m. Prior to hitting Shame, we launched this night’s tour just up the alleyway at District Elleven, where Andrew Alverson starts Sally off with a fancier version of a vodka/cranberry. He and D11’s Colby Schaffer chat with us at the bar between customers. I sip a mocktail to start the tour light while I interview Sally, the glow of my laptop out of place in the moody, dim lounge. Some people ask what we’re doing, and when I say I’m interviewing Sally she seems pleased, acknowledged as special enough to warrant a story. She is.
My first question to her is less the existential “why are we here?” and more of the situational “why are we here?” Like, when did these tours begin, and for what purpose?
Dates with Nate
Sally traces it all back to 2011. She was working downtown off Nevada Avenue for KinderMorgan; she’d been an accountant since 1984. She worked for the same company (previously Colorado Interstate Gas) for 37 years in the same building, and she and coworkers would stop by the Famous once a week or so after work. There, she met Luis Rodriguez, Evan Martz (out of the industry) and Colby Carlson (now at Red Gravy). Over several years, she got to know them each a little through casual convos.
In 2012, her husband John passed away from a sudden heart attack while hiking in Red Rock Canyon. They’d met when she was 16 while working together at a McDonalds outside of Chicago. They got married two years later; he was 23, five years her elder. Though she was born in Olathe, Kansas, she’d been in the big city since age 10. They later left together and came to Colorado Springs where she studied accounting and eventually got an MBA from UCCS. John had several jobs, including managing 7-Elevens, but he went to massage school in the 90s and found work at the Broadmoor spa. He worked there until the early aughts, when his health forced him to retire. Sally’s income supported them forward.
Also in 2012, Sally met legendary local bartender and mixology historian Nate Windham. She attended one of his “Dates with Nate” Sunday cocktail classes at The Blue Star. She was instantly hooked, and frequented his bars as he traveled around town, eventually landing at Brooklyn’s on Boulder when it opened around 2016. “That became my spot,” Sally says. “At that time there weren't as many other good cocktail bars in town.” Sally credits Nate with essentially saving her life during a very tough year by putting her on the path toward her future industry tribe. At Brooklyn’s she also befriended Dylan Currier (now co-owner of The Archives), Regan Capozzella (now at Bar 33), Philip Taylor (now a sommelier in New York City, who personally called Sally “industry mom”) and Carlos Garcia (who recently left the Springs for my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama).
I reach out to Carlos, who says “She really is a mom. She’s been to every single one of my cocktail competitions. She helped me get furniture the first time I lived on my own when I was 21. She’s helped me through breakups, and she was there when I made my first martini up to Nate’s standards. She’s an incredible woman!” He mentions they’ll be FaceTiming later that week. (Relatedly: Sally has made it to almost every one of my monthly Sip with Schnip events around town; the only one I can recall she missed was because she was out of town.)
Anyway, when Dylan moved down the street to Sakura (in the back of Rooster’s House of Ramen then; what’s now Allusion Speakeasy), Sally followed him and met Shayne Baldwin. “I was wary of him at first” she says. “Like, who’s this baby behind the bar, who the hell is this kid?” Now, they’re close friends, with common interests, says Shayne. “He’s much younger than me, but he reads, watches older movies, listens to history podcasts — he’s very smart,” Sally adds. She notes most of her friends are now in their 30s. She was 51 when her husband passed away and she tried some dating apps in later years, but found in her experience that most men who want to date women in their 50s are in their 70s. “I don’t relate to 70 year olds,” she says. “I’d rather just have good people to be around. I don’t need anything else.”
As for how they became roomies, Sally and Shayne had already become good buds before he took off to work in New York City a few years ago. When she heard he was looking to return home a year ago, she offered a spare room in her house to help him easily get resettled. She’d never had a roommate before, but things worked out swimmingly. She’s friends with his girlfriend Karina and sometimes she and Shayne make time to watch a basketball game together or just relax at the house. “But I see him more when I’m sitting at The Archives than when I’m home,” she says, noting somewhat opposite schedules due to his late-night bar life. Still, she says, “It’s just nice to have someone else around to care about.”
Boomerang
Our third tour stop is to Chiba Bar where Sally’s greeted by her good friend Anastacio GarciaLiley behind the bar. They’d first met around five years ago when he was at 503W, and she attended many of his Bartender’s Guild events in recent years when he was a co-organizer. She has it marked on her calendar to attend the opening of Anastacio’s new Cocktails After Dusk venture on Aug. 9. That’s with fellow bartender Tim Chapman, who also drops by Chiba for a drink with us, and who Sally dressed up as for Halloween in 2023. She showed up in a Fernet-Branca sweatshirt and a beanie cap to Cowboy Star to surprise him at his bar. She says he didn’t get it at first, until a co-worker was like, “dude, she’s dressed as you!”
Sally’s also well acquainted with Chiba’s other popular bartenders like John Terry and Camille Stellar, as well as Chiba’s owner Mike Carsten, who she sat with as an honored guest at a recent paired dinner there.
“Chiba is usually my food stop on the tour,” Sally tells me. She gets a pour of cold sake and we also order some bites. Chef Kalen Janifer appears and effortlessly talks me into an omakase meal, then buries me in good eats. Jacob has followed us down from Shame & Regret and we all share the food. At some point, I don’t remember why, they hug and I snap a photo of them. Then, for my own amusement if nothing else, I upload the image to Chiba’s cocktail printer from my phone and have it printed on the egg white foam of my cocktail, an alluring rosemary gin and Campari drink finished with Earl Grey syrup, named Meet Hanako At Embers (a nerdy reference to the video game Cyberpunk 2077). I present the finished drink to them, proud of my jackassery, and they give a polite laugh. I’m still trying to finish my food when I see Sally starting to get antsy and tap her credit card on the counter, ready to pay, and move on in the tour. I can tell that I’m too long-winded and would easily turn her four-hour rounds into six with my gabbing — so it’s a good thing I don’t do this often and hold her back.
On our way to The Archives as our last stop, she says, “this is when I get my steps in for the day.” I ask how many on a given tour night, and she says around 4,000 or 5,000. Continuing with the theme of Sally onboarding new friends with each bar opening, she says when Archives first opened “everyone worked there.” So she buddied up with Zach Long (Colorado Craft), George Dillon (out of the industry), Adam Ridens (later the co-founding chef at Ephemera) and Zak Popovich (Cowboy Star).
“Archives is my Cheers bar if I was Norm,” she says, telling me another story about how Dylan once whipped up a Black Manhattan portion as a boomerang for her to take on a trip to London. A boomerang is an illegal but cherished practice amongst bartenders whereby they send shots — poured into mini jars or plastic wrapped glassware, even Tupperware — to each other via patrons (usually a trusted regular) on their way to a next bar. It’s an amusing secret handshake that builds camaraderie. Some nights shots come back their way. Sally’s destination in London was the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel, rated among the top 50 bars in the world. She says that after a couple drinks she got up the courage to approach a staff member and present the shot. She says it was well received, and they made a Hanky Panky for her in return. She ferried it on the rest of her travels, including through Iceland, eventually bringing it home and drinking it with Dylan. The boomerang had returned to the hand. Nice work, Sally.
Connection
While she sips on a Sakura Martini made with sake, Japanese gin and maraschino liqueur, I ask Sally more questions about the “why” of these tours, as several of our prior convos have been naturally interrupted with bar banter. But I also ask what she likes to do on the nights of the week that she doesn’t go out. She tells me she’s otherwise a homebody who likes to build puzzles. She’ll sometimes go out to dinner at places like the Warehouse or Ephemera with her friend Eric who she met on tour one night. She’ll watch TV, most recently The Bear. But she also volunteers twice a week for Care and Share Food Bank and she acts as the secretary for the Gold Hill Mesa townhome HOA. She retired from the office job in 2021, and she says that’s really when her bar tours in their current form began in earnest. “I do this for a living now,” she jokes.
But she doesn’t stay in a rut, drinking the same drinks over and over again, although a Negroni is her go-to to get a feel for a new-to-her place’s prowess. Sometimes she mixes that up with a Boulevardier instead. She likes spirit-forward drinks and she’s not the biggest tequila or mezcal fan, though she says she’s always willing to try drinks made with them.
Having heard her story about venturing to London, I ask if she aims to travel more during her retirement. She says she and her husband did a fair amount of international exploration and she did even more, mostly cruises, after he passed away, to keep busy. But “right now I just don’t feel like it much,” she says. Instead, she’s excited by the idea of helping co-finance and open a new cocktail bar with a few of her industry friends. I won’t disclose who at this time, but she says they’ve already issued some letters of interest on places, and she’d like to help out in the background with the accounting work. “It could be a rewarding late chapter of life,” she says, “since I’m so into bars. A lot of times I will sit by myself and observe — I know what good bar service looks like.”
It’s why she also frequents places on her tours like Odyssey Gastropub, Four by Brother Luck, Bar Thirty Three and Tony’s. She also likes to brunch at 503W to see Emilio Ortiz and crew.
“I go to see family at this point,” she says. “I know that there’s about 20 people I could call who’d do almost anything for me if I needed.”
She has no children, and says literally this is the only family she has left. “Everyone’s gone. This is my community now. They consider me part of it, as “Bar Mom.”
To the heart of why she tours, she says “if I didn’t do this I’d be lonely.” She mentions an article she read not long ago about how loneliness and isolation are as bad for a person as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. (It’s true; the surgeon general said it.) By comparison, what’s the harm of a drink an hour during her rounds, a few nights a week? She’s not going to call it healthy, per se, but she’s clearly embraced a belief about the lesser of two evils — and she’s not a churchgoer, by the way.
What’s important to her at this time in her life, she says, is people. “As I’ve gotten older, it’s a lot less about things and a lot more about people.”
As if to help me shape my synopsis of this story — her story — she says “It’s a story about how one person has tried to get over grief and loneliness, and found some great people — a whole community of great people.”
It’s connection over cocktails. A perpetual bartender’s boomerang of circular love. “What I find interesting is some people say I love you easily,” she says. “I go out to see my bartenders so I can get a hug and kiss and be told “I love you Sally.”
One of us
The bartender who’s known Sally the longest is Luis Rodriguez, the one she initially bonded with at The Famous, who’s now at Tony’s. I give him a call and try to phrase an easy catch-all question, basically “What does Sally mean to you?”
The first thing he says is “she’s always followed me wherever I go — she’s always supporting us.” Then he reaches for an analogy that places her in context for himself and the wider community. It’s Peter Pan.
“What I always feel like with Sally is I’m Pan in Neverland and she’s Wendy who left and grew up and now here to stay with us Lost Boys. We’re just Pan and Wendy hanging out — that vibe. And all the Lost Boys are the bartenders. We’re pumped she’s here. It’s our family.”
Luis says when they travel together they have similar styles, mainly as foodies. “She’s my best friend,” he says. “There’s that nature to it, like we already had a past life together and now we’re having another. When I’m with her, it’s like, “yeah, let’s go fuck with some pirates.”
That’s why he leans on the Peter Pan reference, he says. It’s common bond kinship over adventures on proverbial islands. And in the same way comedians hang out with comedians, he lumps Sally into the bartender gang as one of them.
“When you’ve been behind the bar as long as I have, you realize you need to be next to people of your feather,” he says. We have a different way of thinking, eating, drinking — a whole different way of life.” Sally has the same frame of mind, he says.
With her, he says, it’s nice to be with someone who listens to you, because as a bartender most customers just want to talk to you. “They want to tell us everything.”
When Sally does do the talking, he says she “talks the same way as us, so it’s like hanging out with other bartenders.”
As Jacob Pfund had said, she’s not the average bar fly. She might be sitting on the other side of the counter, but she’s one of the crew. One of the misfits. Bar Mom.
Matt, this was one of the greatest things I have read by you. I appreciate that you took the time to recognize and tell the story of an incredible lady who means so much to so many of us. Love you Sally!
One night last winter my husband and a friend went bar hopping. First was Shame and I saw Sally but didn’t know her. Next District 11 and there she is. On to Brooklyns and she is there. I knew there had to be a story there. Thanks for telling it.