Q&A: All About the Dives of Wisconsin With Divemaster Scott Small

Wisconsin is a rich tapestry of dive bars, and for the past four years, Scott Small and a handful of college buddy barflies have been documenting the best of them. Their Dives of Wisconsin social media accounts pay extra attention to the taverns outside the state’s population centers.

We spoke with Small about the nature of dive bars, how he approaches his dive visits and some of his favorites.

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What makes a bar a dive bar?

Well first of all it has to be old. The older a bar gets, stories are written on the walls and in the rooms of the bar. You have a bartender who’s worked there for 20 years. They’re gonna know everything about every nook and cranny of the place.

But also, geographically, there are bars that are so connected to a community and that has become the social third space, if you will. And past just generational lines – it’s not just a bunch of 20-year-olds coming here, but there’s 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds, 40-year-olds, 50-year-olds.

You have to have both of those to start, and then I always say there has to be a wild card thing. You have to have some schtick, whether it’s the oldest bar in whatever county or – the one I always think of is Clyde’s Corner [in Beldenville, in western Wisconsin]. They have, like the world champion Big Buck Hunter plays out of Clyde’s Corner. That’s just such a cool little tidbit.

But every bar has something that they do that’s different from every other bar. And then the community becomes imprinted into that and they take it to their friends from other towns and it becomes kind of like almost like a local legend type thing.

Some people see a requisite trait of a dive bar being that it’s a little dumpy or unsavory or dangerous or something like that. Do you see it that way?

I don’t think so. We’ve had a lot of bars reach out to us when we post the bar and they’ll say, “You know, I appreciate the publicity and whatnot, but I don’t think that we want to be considered a dive bar.” Look, dive bar, for me, is a term of endearment. I seek out dive bars. I think the Internet has done a great job of putting these things on display and finding that culture where now, if I went to Eau Claire and I just Google “bars near me,” I might not find the bar that I want. But if I looked up “dive bars near me,” I think I probably would.

And it’s kind of become its own niche, but very popular in so much that there are bars now that are brand spanking new and they hire interior design companies to design it like a dive bar.

Right, which is, can we just say, that is not a dive bar?

I completely agree. I don’t like to call out certain bars, but there’s one in particular in Milwaukee – Drink Wisconsinbly. I think it’s just like the epitome of the fake dive bar. Like, you can’t charge $7 for a Miller Lite and then be a dive bar. You just can’t. And that maybe that’s the fourth pillar here that’s holding up the Colosseum: the price, right? That’s too expensive.

How do you describe what you do with Dives of Wisconsin?

It started by just posting a new bar every day – just a group of buddies from college and we all loved these sorts of bars. And after college, during COVID, we were like, you know, we need to do something together so that we can like, you know, communicate with each other. I had this idea of this Dives of Wisconsin thing. I thought, “Why isn’t there something like this?”

The way I describe it is just cataloging Wisconsin dive bars, but we also dive into Wisconsin culture in general – kind of pop culture combined with drinking culture. And at this point probably 60% of the pictures that we’ve posted of bars are from people who are going to those bars regularly. They are followers who want their bar to be posted.

I imagine you’re going to a lot of bars where almost everyone is a regular and you’re not – it’s almost a cloistered setting. How do you have the experience of a dive bar that’s new to you without ruining it for the regulars?

Well, the first thing you don’t do is shove a camera in their face and like, start taking pictures all over without talking to the bartender about the bar. How long have you worked here? Can you tell me about this place? Because I’ve heard about it, but I’ve never been here before. And all the best places have great stories attached to them. More often than not, you’ll find that bartenders want to tell those stories because they’re proud of where they work, and they should be.

There’s this bar in South Milwaukee, the East Side Tavern, this bartender that works there named Joy. And I don’t know the exact number, but I think one time I went there and she told me that she had been bartending there for, like, over 35 years. Could you imagine the stories that she could tell that she never gets to tell? Because no one asks about the clientele there. So if you just go in and ask her about it – you might get a free drink out of it, but you’ll definitely get some good stories out of it.

It’s so interconnected with the community – that bartender, who’s worked there for a while, probably knows more about the community than you know, or the average person that lives there, just because they lived through it. And they have people coming in there all the time after major life events. I think that’s beautiful in a way, and I think that when you ask more questions, typically it goes better for you.

The outer counties of central and northern Wisconsin, if you’re going to a place that’s not like a, you know, a vacation destination, not like Door County or something like that, but true like central Wisconsin ruralness, they might not have a new person go in there for like weeks on end. They’re surprised, but they’re also excited, and can learn a lot from people because it’s another person for them to tell their stories to.

What is the Dive Bar Bracket?

So that was the idea that we had pretty soon after we started doing a bar a day. I started getting a little bit sad because a lot of my favorite bars had already been posted and we started gaining a lot of followers and I started thinking, you know, I want to repost this bar. We started on Jan. 1, and by the time March rolled around, I wanted to find something to do that was a little bit more interactive. And of course March Madness is happening. I think the first one we only did 16 bars and then we’ve mostly done 32 ever since. It’s voted on by Twitter and Instagram and Facebook polls. This year I counted up over 250,000 votes, which outweighs a lot of primary state rep elections.

And that’s over the four years that you’ve been doing the bracket?

Four years total, yeah. So, but the last two specifically probably account for 200,000 of those. We opened up Facebook and there are cultural differences between Twitter users, Instagram users and Facebook users. I should have thought about this earlier, but dive bar – I call them pillars, the people who hold up these bars – are typically in that 40 to 60 range. They’re not on Twitter; they’re on Facebook. So I’ve done a lot to try to give back to the Facebook group and post on that more often.

What bars have won the bracket?

So you can’t win it more than once in five years. But the winners were Showboat Saloon in the Dells year one. It was Nick’s on Second in Platteville year two. Platteville repeated, but it was The Annex bar in Platteville year three, and then Chub & Sandy’s won this year’s. That’s up in Hurley, about a 5-iron away from the Upper Peninsula.

Whatever bar wins the tournament, the following summer we do a Dives Fest where we go there and basically throw a huge party just celebrating both that bar specifically and dive bars in general in Wisconsin. So this year it [was] Aug.17 at Chub & Sandy’s. It’s like a five-hour drive from here.

That’s a long way to go for a bar, man.

Yeah. We do sell T-shirts at that event – like 100 a year – to pay for my gas and hotel room. But we don’t really sell anything else.

What are some of your favorite dives in the state?

The one that I think of the most as the most dive bar is The Joynt in Eau Claire. It’s on a kind of college-y street – a lot of the college bars are on the same street – but they have the history. They’ve had all these incredible blues and folk singers play there. They have three beers on tap, and a pitcher, at least when I was in college, was just a couple bucks. They have peanuts. It’s just a great place to, like, sit and have a drink with friends.

The Moccasin in Hayward. That one is for the most part a taxidermy museum connected to a bar. They have the state record muskie in there I think. But also just you know, a quiet town, Hayward of maybe 2,000 people and cheap drinks. Good location, great bartending staff.

In terms of southern Wisconsin, here’s a sort of deep cut. It’s Slices in Madison. It’s basically built into a metal shed, and the owner came up with a name because he worked at the Oscar Mayer plant across the street and sliced off one of his fingers. Just a great place, kind of on the outskirts of Madison, but really friendly staff that’s been there for a long time. A good spot to meet off of 94.

Is that a meat raffle place?

Oh yeah, they do meat raffles. I’ve done a couple of their golf outings – it’s really a drinking outing connected to a golf course.

What’s the diviest thing you’ve ever seen in a bar?

There’s this bar called Clancy’s and it’s Wisconsin’s only Irish-themed pirate bar. It’s named after a parrot that used to fly around the bar, and they have since stuffed the parrot and it now sits in a corner of the bar. It’s in Eau Claire, right downtown, next to a church.

I think about the Eagle Saloon in Independence, Wisconsin – it’s probably about a 50-foot-long wooden bar, and for a very long time it was one beer tap right in the middle of the bar. It was $1.50 a pint of Busch Light all day, every day, and it was always packed when I was there. That’s what I think of – people don’t come here because of your beer selection or anything like that, they come here to socialize. You have cheap beer that people like, and there’s a lot of space for them to sit down.

What about you? You live in Milwaukee?

I live in Milwaukee. I’m from Watertown, which at one time was the highest bars per capita in the United States of any city. I went to Eau Claire for college, came to Milwaukee for law school, so I’ve been to a lot of places that you would consider to be both like the rural dives, the college dives and now the Milwaukee dives. And I think there’s good things about each of them.

When I came to Milwaukee, I actually lived across the street from Wolski’s on Pulaski and started going there, you know, semi frequently. And I was like, wow, this place is awesome. And there’s places like this all around Wisconsin, but people focus in on this one because it’s in the middle of a neighborhood in Milwaukee. I think that’s probably part of the inspiration to starting the whole thing – sharing what else is in Wisconsin outside of Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay.

What’s your local these days?

My friends and I do several bars throughout the night. We call it the Riviera because it’s on the Milwaukee River. Wolski’s, The Standard, Hosed on Brady, Roman Coin and then Fink’s. My personal hidden gem in Milwaukee is Champion’s Pub just off North Avenue – really good bar, great patio, cheap drinks.

Anything else that you want to add about dive bar culture in Wisconsin?

Whenever I talk to folks about this, the one thing I always add and it’s always you know, how do you define a dive bar, what makes a dive bar? My tagline has become “You can’t always find a dive bar on a map, but you can always find it in your heart.” My definition will be different from your definition. It is what you make of it. There are no rules as to what makes a dive bar, and certainly I could say that I’ve been to a lot of them, but I’m not any sort of authority on it.

If you like a bar and you think that it’s a dive bar, it’s a dive bar.