You do! Play to win!

Last month, in the wake of the initiative to privatize the state's liquor business, the liquor control board held an auction.

For sale: the right to sell spirits in the state's liquor stores, which are smaller than 10,000 square feet (the footage normally required to sell spirits per the new law).

The auction netted $30.75 million, but eighteen of the high bidders didn't pay up (and wound up sacrificing their deposits).

Hence, a new auction on Thursday May 24, starting at 10 am. Among the locations up for sale again: Enumclaw, Ocean shores, Bellevue, Spokane, and the high-traffic downtown Seattle and Broadway locations. A full list of stores is below the jump.

And if you're in the market for a liquor store, there are more details on the WSLCB website.

Continue reading »

• KATHRYN SCHUESSLER

The space it occupies is rumored to be haunted as shit: It was a mortuary long ago, though more of us remember the immediately previous Chapel, a throbbing nightclub with an upstairs lounge rife with seedy happenings (which are the best kind) involving "handjobs and red pleather sex couches," the Pine Box's staff says. The interior is different now—all clean wood, flowery wallpaper, and giant wads of sunshine pouring in from everywhere.

Spooky and sexy and weird! Now that the joint is all cleaned up, the Pine Box also offers a nice happy hour, including $1 off all drinks and appetizers "such as $5 flatbread with arugula and walnut pesto spread or the $11 assorted-meats-cheeses-olives-bread plate."

Read more about the Pine Box here! Happy hour starts in 30 minutes (3 pm) and goes until 6 pm. Watch out for ghosts!

Neat! They even have a TV over the urinal, as Heather Allard, the bar's co-owner:

Your bar was formerly a lane in a bowling alley. Have any overly enthusiastic or intoxicated patrons slid down it like bowling balls?

[Laughs] No, but people have tried to slide their beers across it. The weirdest thing someone has done here—well, it was my idea to put a TV above the urinal—a friend of mine walked into the bathroom, and a guy was standing back about four feet to pee.

Read more about it here!

We don't yet know all the faces behind the winners of last Friday's online auction for the state's liquor stores—or, more specifically, the rights to apply for a license to sell liquor in the soon-to-be-former state stores—but the Washington State Liquor Control Board just sent out a press release with the basic results.

We do know that the stores were sold off to individual bidders instead of one big bidder for all the stores. (The auction offered a buy-all-stores option to any bidder who singlehandedly outbid all of the high bids for individual stores.) According to the press release: "The sum of individual bids exceeded the $4.6 million all-store high bid by a nearly 7:1 ratio." (Sorry, "Dumb Dick.")

Some other details:

Total sum of individual bids: $30.75 million

High all-store bid: $4.6 million (will not count)

Registered bidders: 551

Total number of bids: 14,627

Single stores to individuals: 93

Multiple stores to individuals: 28

Lowest winning bid: $49,600 for Store 186 in Spokane (Division street)

Highest winning bid: $750,100 for Store 122 in Tacoma (72nd and Pacific)

Increase in bids on final day: $23.7 million

• SAUMAYA SHARMA

Scene: The bartender says the building Pizzeria 22 occupies was once a dry cleaner's, a tarot reader's, and a bakery's storage unit—though not all at once, disappointingly. The space is long and trim with plenty of dark wood, low-hanging lights, and collections of hand-painted platters and Madonna-with-child iconography. There's also an image of Italian volcano Mount Vesuvius, famed for an ancient flash eruption that left detailed ashen casts of its thousands of victims—all of them looking pretty freaked-out.

Happy hours: Mon–Fri 4–6 pm.

Happy-hour drink specials: $1 off everything, including drafts ($4.50 Stella Artois, $2.50 Genesee), wine ($7 Kiona Lemberger), bottles and cans ($3.50 Peroni), cocktails (the $9 Maserati Margarita has Hussong's tequila, Luxardo, and Grand Marnier with fresh-squeezed lime), and wells ($4).

And, if you get there before 5 pm, you can partake in their $1 beer specials!

Get all the info here.

According to the rules of publicsurplus.com—an Ebay for governments—if you bid on an item five minutes before the auction closes, it'll extend another five minutes and so on ad infinitum until five minutes elapse without any new bids.

Currently, all of the Washington State liquor stores are in overtime. You can watch the action here.

Only three and a half hours left to go in the great state liquor sell-off of 2012. (Here is a quick summary of the convoluted situation, including how the state isn't actually auctioning the stores, but the right to apply for a license to sell liquor at the stores, blah blah blah.)

The PI has a story about a man who wants to buy all 167 stores—if his bid for all the stores is higher than the individual bids for individual stores put together, he'll get 'em all. Meet potential new liquor overlord "Dumb Dick":

One local man has already put in his offer to the state. Richard Gates, who also goes by the name "Dumb Dick," is offering to buy all 167 of the licenses for a cool $760,000. "Right now I'm the high bidder, if the state wants to sell it to me at that price I'll take it," Gates said from the 19th Hole Pub in Bremerton.

The story goes on to show that his sum-total bid is not, in fact, higher than the collected individual bids.

So how are the auctions going? The cheapest store at the moment is in Pasco, going for $20,100.

The most expensive? The liquor store closest to Stranger HQ, at 12th and Pine, which is going for $250,100. The high bidder at the moment is someone named "kang11." (One of the previous bidders was Seven-ElevenJapanLtd.)

The second-most expensive is on Greenwood Ave, and is currently going for $230,100 to someone named "shindaupple." And the current high bid for all the stores is old "Dumb Dick" himself, at $4,500,400.

I'm logged in to the auction, so if you're curious about who's bidding how much at specific state liquor store, just put it in comments and I'll look it up for you. (A store number would be helpful, if you can find it.)

Now only 3 hours, 16 minutes to go!

• SAUMAYA SHARMA

Also, there's this:

Bernard's fun facts: It's closed on weekends, and the drinks are always freakishly underpriced ($2.50 wells, $4 calls). A regular says the space might've been an old speakeasy: According to legend, a trapdoor somewhere under the carpet drops to train tracks below. And nobody knows where it came from or what it means, but there's a giant mural depicting a medieval courtyard scene with mythical creatures and flaxen-haired princes draped in embroidery, maybe hoping to smite something.

Read more about Bernard's in this week's Happiest Hour, then get over there and chow down on free food!

• batch206.com
• The Moonshiners.

Local boozemaker Batch 206 Distillery is making moonshine tomorrow and we're all invited! Moreover, Tim, Tickle, and JT from "Moonshiners" will be there helping (hindering? I haven't seen the show) master distiller Rusty Figgins (who has the perfect name for a moonshine-maker).

It's at the Batch 206 distillery in Interbay from noon to 4 p.m.—RSVP now, as space is limited.

The Washington State Attorney General's Office wants you to know:

Cowlitz County Superior Court Judge Stephen Warning today reversed his March 2 ruling and upheld Initiative 1183, allowing the state to continue to implement the liquor sales initiative approved by nearly 60 percent of the state’s voters. [...]

In Judge Warning’s earlier ruling, he found the initiative violated a state rule prohibiting initiatives from addressing more than one subject—also known as the “single-subject” rule—because it included the section directing $10 million of the liquor revolving fund proceeds to public safety. The state argued the source of funds and how the funds are allocated are closely connected – and therefore the section did not violate the rule.

In his decision today, Judge Warning agreed with the state.

Now the distribution industry—led by the wine giants who tried to stop the initiative—plans to appeal to the State Supreme Court.