MUGNIFICENCE
Drinking club at Pepperoni’s, at the Mary Jane lodge, is packed and worth toasting
Hard-core skiers and boarders at Mary Jane know about it, but few tourists wander into Pepp’s. ¶ It’s just as well. They might feel out of place in the Mary Jane base lodge’s dimly lit basement bar, officially called Pepperoni’s Pizzeria and Bar. Its creators at Winter Park Resort appeared to go out of their way to remove any ski-resort trappings — but for thousands of Pepp’s most devoted fans, both the dingy red-patterned carpet and the anti-resort vibe are among the draws.
The measure of regulars’ love for the place is easy to see — and count: Glass mug after glass mug line shelves behind the bar, and they fill racks that dominate the cramped kitchen, where bartenders make Pepp’s popular $3-a-slice pizza.
All of the mugs are claimed, with a tattered list of mug-club members on a clipboard now holding steady at 2,800. New membership has been limited in recent seasons and is now frozen, for a simple reason: Pepp’s has no more room to store mugs.
“We always come to see our mugs — it’s my 15th day this season,” says Brent Tatman, 47, the owner of No. 729, who stopped in for lunch with friends after a morning of skiing fresh powder. He has skied Mary Jane’s advanced and expert terrain since Winter Park Resort opened that section when he was a kid.
“It’s like being at your local bar, but it’s an hour and a half away from home,” says Amanda Wessels of Broomfield, who bought No. 2,482 four years ago. Her husband, Eric, owns No. 2,483.
To walk into Pepp’s in 2017 is to enter a world that’s increasingly a throwback to Colorado’s nofrills skiing heritage. Dives still exist in Colorado ski towns, but not usually on resort property at the large ski resorts. They keep ratcheting up lift-ticket prices — Vail is $189 a day right now, and even Winter Park’s walk-up price is $149 — and are finding ways to charge close to $20 for a burger in their upscale cafeterias.
Pepp’s has the feel of a place that corporate management doesn’t know about.
Lately, bartender Dani Dresch and that management — Intrawest operates Winter Park, which is owned by the city of Denver — have been figuring out what to do with the mug club. The bar started the club 11 years ago, during Winter Park’s 30th anniversary year, and it quickly became sought-after among Mary Jane die-hards.
“At this point, they just said it’s ‘one out, one in,’ ” Dresch said during an early January visit. “But that’s not really a thing because … nobody leaves.”
That’s what she likes about the mug club, which Winter Park likes to bill as the state’s largest. Though some of the members eventually take their mugs home as keepsakes, the bar staff hasn’t thrown out the mugs left behind.
Long-dormant mugs from the early days — from among the first 400 or so issued — are on a “retirement” ledge along the wall opposite the bar, above a bright-colored mountainscape mural. If an owner returns, the bar returns the mug to an active shelf.
Dresch, who supervises Pepp’s staff of seven, takes pride that she’s not part of salaried management after more than six years at the bar and 16 ski seasons at Winter Park. She likes the bar shifts too much — and seeing the regulars, who call out their mug numbers with their beer orders.
“Hey, Dani, do you have any mugs this year yet?” a younger man asks her. “No,” she replies, matter-of-factly.
This is a common question this season. “Like 50 times a day,” she tells a reporter.
Mug-club members most recently paid a one-time fee of $30 plus tax to join the lifelong club and get their own mug. Each time they visit, from season to season, they get 22-ounce pours for the price of a pint.
Pepp’s customers don’t come for eight or 10 taps of craft beer, like they might find at other Winter Park outposts. Dresch’s three handles last month included the New Belgium Brewing-made Mary Jane Ale, a Winter Park exclusive that’s a hoppy amber in this season’s incarnation, along with its Ranger IPA. The third option? Coors Light. That is Tatman’s beer of choice. “That way I can keep skiing. I can have a couple of them and I’m not a mess,” he says, which is particularly important on this January weekday. “It was waist deep where we were skiing, in the trees.”
Many members have decorated their mugs — with stickers, beer logos or images that are personal to them. “Our favorite mugs go on the top three shelves,” Dresch says, “which is up to us because we have to look at them every day.”
Tatman’s is simple: his name on the background of a white-andblack Batman logo.
He lives in Castle Pines but has a place in Winter Park, and sometimes he feeds his family on the cheap — but serviceable — pizza at Pepp’s. On this day, he’s joined by friends including the owner of mug No. 710, Todd Haavind, a longtime pal who lives in Fraser.
“Brent and I have been coming up since we were 14 years old, on the Eskimo Ski Bus,” Haavind says.
As adults, they always hit Pepp’s, a place with poor cell reception and chatty patrons that offers a sort of modern relief. “It’s like we unplug and we go back in time and we’re kids again,” he says. “We just came off two awesome powder runs, and this is like — feel the vibe in here: It’s amazing.”
Donald Robb, 29, asked for mug No. 1,142, from which he now drinks the Mary Jane Ale. He bought the mug after he turned 21, along with other friends who’d been skiing together since high school.
His mug sports a painted Blue Moon logo, chosen as a protest when a former bartender, named Billy, dropped that beer from the taps.
“You always meet new people here,” says Robb, who lives in Westminster and attends school. “You talk about different runs that you’ll go down, things you might not have seen before, things that happened in town.”
While he talks, a departing group yells to Dresch as they leave. “Bye guys! Happy powder day!” the bartender shouts back.
Mug No. 1,225 belongs to Dave Dahl, Winter Park’s base operations manager. But he rarely asks for it.
“I’m in management. I think one of my employees got ahold of it and drew obscene things on it,” he said. “So I try to use other people’s mugs.”
He called Pepp’s a “ski-in, skiout dive bar.” The outdated carpet — Dahl used a word that rhymes with “gritty” — and the low-key atmosphere that make the place stand out at Winter Park are among the things he likes most.
But lately, he’s been trying to figure out what to do about the mug club.
For the first two months of the season, the answer was to keep it closed to new members, after the bar had rationed off mugs in recent seasons. But Dahl and Dresch have put together a plan in recent weeks.
It includes weeding out some long-dormant mugs to make way for a set of undecorated “loaner” mugs that will be shared by new members — starting next season, Dresch said. In the meantime, the bar is doling out a handful of mugs to persistent frequent customers who have been waiting to join.
So far, a waiting list to join in 2018 — capped at 50 — already has filled up, Dresch said. The list for 2019 is filling up fast.
Dresch has mixed feelings. Back in January, she said she even disliked using the word “retired” to describe the older, dormant mugs that were stored up high.
“They’re not,” she said, “because it’s a black-lung club. You never actually retire.”