The Mug Club,
explained for locals.
Ninety-nine dollars a year. Numbered ceramic mug. A dollar off every draft at four Stage Stops. Free side with every entrée. Free birthday meal. This is the Mug Club written up for the Colorado Springs regular who’s already eating with us four times a month — not the Pikes Peak weekend tourist.
The Stage Stop Mug Club is $99 a year. You get a numbered ceramic mug that stays on the wall at the Cantina, $1 off every draft at all four Stage Stops (the Cantina plus the three brewery-parked trucks at Mash Mechanix, Old Colorado City, and Urban Animal Star Ranch), a free side with every entrée, double points always, a free birthday meal, first-Tuesday Pit Master Tasting access, BOGO sandwich Tuesdays, and the quarterly sauce drop. It’s built for the four-times-a-month regular, not the one-time tourist. For a local eating with us twice a week, the membership pays itself back inside fourteen weeks.
— Written by Chef Eve Natasha, Stage Stop BBQ
Every benefit, written out.
No marketing copy. The list. In the order you’ll actually use them.
A numbered ceramic mug. Heavy clay, hand-marked with your member number and your name. It ships to your house in seven days or you pick it up at the Cantina counter. Most members leave it on the wall behind the bar at the Cantina — you walk in, the bartender pulls your mug, you sit down.
$1 off every draft. Every pour, every Stage Stop. At the Cantina, that’s the house draft list. At the three brewery-parked trucks, that’s the brewery’s own taps when the Stage Stop truck is there — the dollar comes off at their bar by handshake, not by app. No daily cap. Stacks across visits.
Free side with every entrée. Brisket plate, pulled-pork sandwich, burnt-end mac bowl, six-hour ribs — whatever you order, the second side comes off. Counts at the Cantina dining room and at every brewery-cart food window the same way.
Double points always. Triple in your birthday month. Points stack on the existing rewards program. You don’t have to remember to do anything — the POS recognizes your phone number at checkout and applies the multiplier on the receipt.
Free birthday meal, up to twenty-two dollars. Brisket plate-sized. Honors at any of the four stops, any day in your birthday month. We send a text the morning of your birthday with a redeem code in case you forget the POS knows.
Pit Master Tasting — first Tuesday of every month. Five courses, Eve hosts, three hours, at the Cantina. Free for Mug Club ($25 otherwise). Thirty seats only. Members get the booking email forty-eight hours before the seats open to the public — most months the public window never opens because the members fill it.
BOGO sandwich every Tuesday. Buy one brisket / pulled pork / turkey sandwich, get the second one free. Slowest weekday on the calendar; the perk exists so a Tuesday becomes a date night without thinking about it.
Quarterly sauce drop. A new sauce every three months — members only, shipped to your door or picked up at your home location. The last one was a smoked-coffee bourbon BBQ. The next one’s in test kitchen now; the early notes mention pecan and tamarind.
Early access on every ticketed event. Beer-pairing dinners, ticketed live-music Saturdays, the holiday brisket lottery. Members get the email twenty- four hours before the public.
Why this is a locals’ club, not a tourist punch card.
Think about $99 as a bar tab. Not the symbolic kind. The actual one. A Saturday lunch at the Cantina with a brisket plate, a beer pair, and a free side is somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-four dollars. Two visits and a beer pour each is $99. The membership is the cost of a real Saturday afternoon, and it pays itself back on the second visit.
That math only works for somebody who’s already showing up. If you eat with us twice a year on a Pikes Peak weekend, the Mug Club is bad math — you’d need ten years to break even, and the mug would gather dust. We’ll be honest: the membership is wrong for you. Order the brisket plate, sit on the patio, enjoy Colorado Springs, come back when the Cog Railway brings you through.
The Mug Club is for the four-times-a-month eater. The Tuesday five-thirty BOGO regular. The Wednesday brewery stop with two pints. The Saturday lunch crew — brisket plate, beer pair, a side off the discount. The first-Tuesday Pit Master Tasting attendee. The birthday dinner with the table of six. Those are the guests every cart and every Cantina ticket lean on. The math is built around them.
The brewery model works because the regulars hold it up. Tourists float through. Regulars own the place. The Mug Club is the oldest, most honest way to give those people something back — a name on a mug on a real wall, a dollar off the pint, a free side with the plate. Here is your mug.
One card. Four stops. Same perks.
The membership is tied to your phone number. Not to a card you have to carry, not to an app you have to open. You walk up to any of the four counters, give a phone number at checkout, the POS recognizes you, the discounts and the point multipliers apply on the receipt.
The four stops: the Cantina at 6620 Old Stage Rd. (sit-down flagship, full bar, live music Saturdays); Mash Mechanix downtown on Pikes Peak Ave.; Urban Animal at Star Ranch on the southside; and Old Colorado City on the westside historic district.
At the Cantina, every perk is in play. Free side with entrée, $1 off house drafts, BOGO Tuesdays, free birthday meal in the dining room, first-Tuesday Pit Master Tasting hosted here, live music Saturdays with table-hold on request. The mug stays on the wall behind the bar; the bartender pulls it without being asked.
At the three brewery-parked trucks, the food side runs the same: free side, double points, BOGO Tuesdays, free birthday meal. The $1-off draft works at the brewery’s own taproom — their bartender pours, the dollar comes off at their bar, our deal with them is the reason. The one honest caveat: this only holds when the Stage Stop truck is there. If you walk into Mash Mechanix on a Monday when we’re not parked, the mug doesn’t pour for the discount. See the truck schedule on each location page so the trip is worth it.
No POS-to-POS integration with the brewery yet. We’re working on it. Each brewery runs its own loyalty program alongside ours — ours stacks with theirs, not against it. Mash Mechanix mug club members who also join our Mug Club get the dollar off from both sides of the bar. We’ve done the math on regulars carrying both — the combined membership stack pays for itself by week ten.
What the Mug Club gets you on a Saturday lunch.
Saturday lunch is the biggest single push of the week. Door opens at 11. By 12:30 there’s a line down the patio, the brisket from the overnight shift is at the slicer, and the pit team is calling cuts to the counter on a twenty-second cycle. The room is loud, the patio is full, the dining room is on the second turn.
For a Mug Club member, that rush carries three specific perks the public doesn’t get.
First call on cuts. Brisket point goes fast. Burnt ends run out by 1pm most Saturdays — the bark-heavy point cut from the fourteen-hour brisket, separated at hour six and re-rubbed, is the candy of the smoker and the table everyone eventually orders. Members at the counter get first call. If point is running low, the bartender flags the pit team and a portion gets held for the next Mug Club ticket. The public ordering after you might get the answer “sold out” while your plate is being built in the back.
Behind-the-counter chat with the pit team. During the rush the pit cooks are head-down on the slicer. After the 1pm push when the line slows, Eve or the pitmaster on shift comes around to the bar and walks the Mug Club tables — the fire, the wood, the overnight shift, the cuts that came off well. Five minutes per table, no schedule, just the move when there’s air in the line.
Table priority on a full house. When the dining room is fully sat, Mug Club members get the next available two-top or four-top ahead of walk-ins. We don’t advertise the perk — it would make the bottleneck worse on the busiest hour — but the host knows. Phone number at the host stand, the next table is yours. On a Saturday rush this is the difference between a forty-minute wait and a ten-minute one.
None of these are listed on the perks page. They’re operational, not promotional. They’re here because regulars asked about them and the answer is yes. The Saturday rush is where being a Mug Club member feels the most concrete.
Where the Mug Club falls short.
The honest version, the part most loyalty pages don’t write down.
You have to commit. Ninety-nine dollars up front, or nine a month on the installment plan. Annual is the better deal — you save fifteen and the mug ships either way. But the membership is built for somebody who’s eating with us at least eight to ten times a year. Below that, the math doesn’t pencil. The free side and the dollar off draft are real but they need volume.
There’s no big promo discount beyond the standard stack. No 20% off your bill. No half-price brisket weekends. No flash-sale member-only nights. The economics of fourteen- hour brisket and post-oak fire don’t leave room for the kind of percentage discount loyalty programs at chain restaurants run. We’d rather hold the price honest than discount the meat — the brisket math doesn’t get cheaper when you order more of it. What the Mug Club gives you is consistent: $1 off every draft, free side every entrée, double points always. Add it up across a year of regular visits and it’s real money. Look at it on a single ticket and it’s a beer and a side. That’s the whole shape.
The brewery-side discount has a tenant gap. The $1 off draft works at the brewery’s own taps when the Stage Stop truck is on-site. When the truck isn’t there — Monday at Mash, Tuesday at OCC — the mug doesn’t pour. We’re working on a brewery-partner POS integration that’d carry the membership across to every taproom open hour, but it requires their POS to talk to ours and not every partner is there yet. If a unified cross-brewery mug is what you’re looking for, ours isn’t it yet.
The mug doesn’t replace the bar tab. You still pay for the drafts, just a dollar less per pour. The free side is real but the entrée is full price. This is a regular’s perk stack, not a discount card.
Don’t buy it for tourists. Gift memberships work for the local who’d have joined anyway. They don’t work for the out-of-town cousin visiting in July and going home in September — the mug ships, the perks expire before they fly back through. Money wasted. We’d rather tell you up front.
Two doors in. Both end at the same numbered mug.
In person at the Cantina counter or any of the three brewery stops, walk up and tell the bartender or counter you want a Mug Club membership. They take a name, a phone number, and a card. The confirmation email hits inside two minutes. The mug ships from the Cantina within seven days, or you pick it up at the Cantina counter on the next visit. Fifteen minutes start to finish.
Online, the front door is /mug-club. The full perks list, the year-one ROI math, and the testimonials live there. The full perks breakdown — every benefit, location by location, the four- hundred-character version of what’s above — lives at /mug-club/perks.
After signup, you’ll get a welcome email with a Save to Google Wallet button. That mints a digital member card to your phone — same member number as the ceramic mug, scannable at the POS if you forgot your phone number, color-matched to the brand. Apple Wallet support is on the roadmap. The digital card is the easy answer for the brewery-truck stops where the ceramic mug isn’t traveling with you.
Payment runs through Stripe. Every common card and Apple Pay and Google Pay accepted. Auto-renew is the default; we email thirty days before the renewal charge with a one- click link to turn it off. Cancel anytime — annual doesn’t refund mid-year, but the benefits run through the date you paid for, and the mug is yours either way.
If you want the longer origin story — why we built the Mug Club, who the founding hundred are, what’s next on the roadmap — that’s the sibling post: the Stage Stop Mug Club story. For the business case behind the brewery-partner model the Mug Club rides on, see why we park at breweries.
$99 a year. Mug ships in seven days. Built for the regulars.
One dollar off every draft. Free side with every entrée. Double points always. Free birthday meal. First-Tuesday Pit Master Tasting. Cancel anytime — the mug is yours either way.