You know you've hit dive bar paydirt when you walk in to find a young female bartender pouring…read moredrinks for an old man who is chain-smoking through his tracheotomy hole. Checkers is done up like a (run down) 1950s diner on the inside. As we drank our beers, the tracheotomy dude told us about the town and said that come sundown, once the farmers come in from the fields, that Checkers would be packed.

A charming little small town dive bar with very cheap beer on tap. We enjoyed the wall art... a…read moreseries of tastefully-done nude portraits, all of the same woman. I don't know if Annie was our bartender or if she was the woman in the art, but neither were particularly fat by any means. :) Both when we arrived and when we left, a little girl opened the door of the laundry next door and stared at us with a scowl. Whether she was curious about the strangers in town or concerned about the sinners drinking in the afternoon remains a mystery.

If you like small town atmosphere Annie's is the place. You can ride up on your horse and tie him…read moreoutside while you enjoy a COLD beer. Also a great place to stop in and have a refreshment if you are on a scenic Motorcycle ride through southern Iowa. Super friendly folks. You will be glad you stopped by.

The Traphouse is a hard place to find. You can circle around the entire block and not find it…read more The trick is to realize that it is not actually located on any street, it is instead located in the dead center of the block and hidden by trees and buildings on all sides. So when you see that gravel alleyway that looks the the driveway of a mobile home, that's where you need to turn in. Inside is a big open area with a square-shaped bar in the center. The walls are covered in hundreds of photos of the bar's loyal patrons. The bartender lamented to me about how the bar business is really hurting in Chillicothe because so many of the town's young people have been moving away. "We have really low overhead, though, so we'll be fine," she added. She's probably right. Most of the other bars in town have either recently closed or changed hands. But the Traphouse has been going strong for years. A big part of that is that of those that have survived, it's the most "real".

The best place in town to relax and enjoy a nice cold adult beverage. Laid back and unpretentious,…read morea place where everyone is friendly and all are welcome! Drinks prices are lowest in town and you get a healthy pour. Play pool, enjoy darts or just shoot the breeze... This place is good for all of the above. A big plus is the outdoor covered smoking area.

My husband and I enjoy this little small town bar for the food as well as the drinks. We often will…read moreorder takeout more than we go in and sit down but both means of service have been great. The food is reasonably priced and very quick to come out of the kitchen. We have brought our out of town friends to this bar, and just enjoyed a night to ourselves here. We do wish they delivered, but it's worth getting out and picking up. Southside will continue to receive our business. P.S. we definitely recommend the cheese curds!

The map here on yelp is pretty accurate, but the GPS unit in our car had the location completely…read morewrong. It kept leading us to an empty building in downtown Gallatin. We found the bar on our own as we headed on south out of town. "Did this place used to be further north?" we asked the bartender. "Nope, it's been here as long as I can remember," she said. "Actually it used to be down on the square," chimed a customer sitting at a nearby table. "About 3 years ago I think it was." So if you try to get here via GPS, make sure its database is up-to-date. :) Anyway, I'm usually not a fan of bars located in manufactured buildings because, as a general rule, they rarely have any character. But this bar has a few things that make up for the bland building it's in. For instance, since it also serves as a diner, it opens at 6:00am so you can get your drink on early. :) Also, their beer coasters cut from carpet samples are pretty clever and are a good example of the little details I look for in local mom-and-pop dives.

A nice, clean biker-friendly bar on the square in downtown Lancaster. Better kept than many small…read moretown bars. The bartender was pretty nice, but also seemed a little skittish of us out-of-towners. This bar had the smallest beer bottles I'd ever seen, 7-oz bottles. I don't know if they were a promotion or something they normally carry, but we had to buy those since we'd never seen anything like it before. (In retrospect that probably made our beer very expensive. :) )

While the owls nest was highly recommended by several locals, which included those who worked at…read morehotel Ottumwa within walking distance (bc no Ubers) and ( fancy like)Applebees. We decided to give it a try, bc dive bar... Service started decent enough, beers were brought in a timely manner and without constant need to ask, bartender admitted there was party coming in later on in the evening. It was also her birthday...Emily I believe. She was excited to get off and go celebrate....it seemed quite early on in our visit that she'd already started celebrating, lots of shots, plenty of time not even in the bar, actually admitted and apologized that she went to the "thrift store". We spent approx 4-5 hours there, same patrons would come and go between the bar and the sidewalk. A little sketchy, even for a dive bar.

The food was delicious as always. The hardest part was ordering the food when I'm not bi- lingiul.read more

I thought Saales Tavern had gone under, but it looks like the liquor license has been renewed…read more Bartenders in Chillicothe have told me that the bar scene in that town is dying due to so many young people leaving town. And, as you can see in the photo, Saales Tavern is on a pretty depressed block. As dive bars go, though, Saales Tavern is a good one. Though the building is very run down, it still has a lot of charm. The bar has a couple of pool tables, several dart boards, and a juke box. There's no better example of a dive bar restroom than what is found here. Tiny, dirty, and with walls of gap-filled rotting boards. We were there during the 3:00 dead hour and we felt kind of sorry for our bartender, he seemed very bored and lonely. We played some trivia and drank slowly to keep him company. :)

Located near the unincorporated town of Thirty, south of Centerville, this roadhouse is a popular…read morecountry-rock themed destination among bikers and the working class. We seated ourselves at the horseshoe-shaped bar. The basics (Bud, Miller Light) are on tap, everything else is in bottles. We ended up getting a couple of bottles. Our bartender was nice and chatty (in a good way) and kept us entertained during our stay. I had some difficulty with the restroom. The men's room door would not close despite repeated attempts by me to do so. Oh well, when you've gotta ago, you've gotta go! I later heard an interesting anecdote about this bar from a patron at another bar. I have been unable to verify the veracity of his story, and it doesn't reflect on The Silver Spur at all as it could happen anywhere, but it's too interesting a bit of gossip not to share: "The Silver Spur used to be called Larry's Silver Spur. Larry was a really nice guy, but then one day his wife up and shot him in the head. She's in prison now." * "Then later there was a couple in there and they had an argument. The girlfriend stormed out and the boyfriend stayed inside, he was going to wait for her to cool off and knew she'd come back in. But she never did... because when she went outside she stepped onto the highway and got flattened by a semi." "They got most of her for the burial, but one arm was unattainable." Like I said, who knows if there's any truth to it or not, but if there is, those are some interesting tidbits about this bar's history. * (I've checked the liquor licenses back as far as 1998, the earliest available online, and it's been the same owner all that time and in fact she may have owned it since at least 1990. So if there's any truth to the shooting story, it was a LONG time ago. However the licenses DO list the official name as "Larry's Silver Spur" despite the fact that the name "Larry" does not appear anywhere on the bar's signage and the owner is a woman.)

One star is actually being nice. Unless you want flies in your drink and to not get served, this is…read morethe place to be! The bartender took forever to get us drinks because she was too busy flirting with every man in there and wasted out of her mind. The last straw was when my girlfriend had a baby ROACH in her screwdriver that she waited 20 minutes for..

Went for the first time and I had what looked like rust flakes in my cup of ice. Some were within…read morethe cubes themselves. I won't risk going back

We will try and visit Lula's again after a bad dish experience hopefully under the new owners it…read morewill be a better experience.