Mean Muggin'

An inside look into Saratoga's thriving mug club scene.

When you sign up for Olde Bryan Inn’s mug club, you sign up for life—mugs are removed only when someone passes away.

Last Thursday at Bailey’s, I said something about the bar’s mug club to a woman named Colleen from Syracuse. “The what?” she asked. “The mug club,” I said again, as if that would in any way help clarify. It didn’t even cross my mind that she wouldn’t know what that was until she asked, “What’s that?” (*Editor’s note: Abby, SLAH’s other half, had also never heard of a mug club.) But it is a thriving, competitive program (sometimes bordering on hidden-in-plain-sight secret society) here, and as a Saratogian, if you ever step into a bar for happy hour, brunch or nightcap, you should at least know the basics. (Know, for example, the mugs hanging from the ceiling are not just for decoration; they have meaning, and there’s a real live person behind every one.) But we, of course, went in even deeper.