Bars, Breweries and Live Music

Every bar, brewery and music room below is open, and we checked each one against its own website before putting it here. So you can pick somewhere from this page and go, without the drive across town to a dark window.

That check is worth doing in Boulder. Two long-standing institutions have closed, one of them only months ago, and both still sit near the top of the search results. You'll find them named further down, so you know which recommendations to ignore elsewhere. After the venues, there are the local rules that shape a night out here, and they're hard to find anywhere else.

Dark Horse is closed. Its own website now says so in as many words. It had been a Boulder landmark since 1975, and it closed roughly four months ago, which is recent enough that most guides haven't caught up. One extra detail worth having: it was at 2922 Baseline Road, so any listing you find giving it a Broadway address is wrong as well as out of date.

The Lazy Dog is closed. There's no live official site, and a different tenant has taken over its old space at 1346 Pearl.

We also left out the Sundown Saloon, not because we think it has closed but because we couldn't confirm anything about it. Its domain sits behind a bot challenge that serves no content, so there isn't a single owner-published fact to stand on. We would rather leave a real bar off the list than tell you it's open when we don't know.

Last call is 2 a.m.

Statewide, every night of the week. Colorado writes it as a prohibition: licensees can't serve for on-premises drinking between 2 a.m. and 7 a.m. Boulder adds no earlier cutoff of its own. Two bills to move last call to 2:30 a.m. have failed in recent sessions, so plan around 2.

Your drink stays inside

Colorado's liquor rules bar an on-premises licensee from letting alcohol leave in any container, sealed or not, with narrow exceptions like a partly finished bottle of wine with dinner. And Boulder prohibits open containers and drinking in public outright, on streets, sidewalks, parking lots, parks and open space. There's no entertainment district or common consumption area in Boulder's code, so unlike some Colorado towns there's no block downtown where a drink in hand is legal.

Halloween on Pearl Street is dry

This is the local rule nobody publishes. Boulder Revised Code 5-7-9 bans possessing any alcoholic beverage on public property, the Pearl Street Mall included, inside the box bounded by Spruce Street, 15th Street, Walnut Street and 10th Street, from 6 p.m. on October 31 until 6 a.m. on November 1, every year. The city manager can extend it to nearby evenings, and any peace officer can seize the drink. Licensed bars and restaurants inside that box are unaffected. It's the public space that goes dry.

No happy hour restrictions

This one gets reported wrong in both directions, so to be clear: we searched the current Colorado liquor rules and the full statute and found no restriction on happy hours, drink specials, or reduced prices. If a page tells you Colorado bans happy hour, it's wrong.

Boulder's two nightlife areas are both formally defined commercial districts, and they feel completely different.

Downtown, around Pearl and 13th, holds the cocktail bars and the bigger rooms. License No. 1, The Bitter Bar, Bohemian Biergarten, Velvet Elk, the Corner Bar and Boulder Theater are all within a few blocks of each other, and Mountain Sun sits on Pearl itself.

University Hill is a three-block district next to campus, established in 1970. The city describes it as an eclectic mix of restaurants, shops and entertainment venues, and "a traditional place where students relax and have fun," which is a diplomatic way of saying it skews young. The Fox Theatre and The Sink are essentially neighbors there, at 1135 and 1165 13th Street.

There's a good historical footnote attached to License No. 1. Boulder outlawed the sale of spirits inside city limits in 1907, so the Hotel Boulderado opened dry in 1909. The bar in its basement received one of the first legal licenses to serve hard liquor in a restaurant in 1969, and by its own account still operates on that same license today.

Dinner before the show is on our sister site Taste Boulder, the market and the food hall are in our own food guide, the mall those downtown bars sit around is covered in the Pearl Street guide, and the full Boulder guide covers every other category.