This morning I composed a review of the latest silky-smooth trippel from Unibroue but then shit happened and I said, screw it. We need a kegger. So without further ado, everybody get in line behind the pressurized tank of social lubricant and try to make small talk. What’s in it? Who cares? For me it was usually Miller Genuine Draft. MGD goes down right, it isn’t quite as thin as Bud, it’s not as insultingly shitty as Coors or PBR and it costs less than practically anything else.
Once you’ve had a few elbow into the living room where everybody’s trying to shout over the Bob Marley and the bass from whatever rap the guys upstairs are playing. Don’t mind the sag in the floor; it hasn’t caved yet and anyway there isn’t anything expensive in the basement.
Kick back and reminisce about youth and alcohol and the damned fool things that happen when you throw them together. I still remember my plastic two-liter soda bottle from college that saved me hours of waiting in keg lines. I called it Zelda although I don’t know why. Yeah, I know it’s pretty lame as far as stories go, but it’s a start. Let’s hear yours.
Pooh
And Jeebus Tim, how can the keg be anything except Iron City or Yuengling?
slickdpdx
Great intro. Umm. Um. I don’t have anything else to say. Party on Tim.
Andrew
Given the flame war from the other thread, let me say this:
Tim, you moron, PBR is the best cheap beer ever!!!
It’s much better than Bud, MGD, and Coors, to say nothing of Beast or other piss.
Pooh
John Cole, I raise a frothy plastic cup to you sir! Let us drink in the spirit of brotherhood and solidarity that only ancient adversaries can know as we commiserate in the disheartening defeat of our respective favorite squads yesterday evening…
(works best if you read it in a John Facenda voice)
Vladi G
Fuck that. I like me some Old Mil.
srv
Oh, I could tell you stories, but, er, I can’t remember them.
Back then we believed in quantity over quality. So whatever had the most bang for buck. Sorta like how we liked women then too.
Good thing we grew up and developed taste. I will now go zombie like into the mist “must find new trippel…”
JWeidner
One buddy of mine is having a party while his folks are away (yes, this is in high school years). Another good friend of mine, who I’ve known since grade school, pours himself a beer, walks away from the keg, chugs about half of what was in his glass, then dumped the rest into First Buddy’s father’s tropical fish tank.
That was the night we all learned a very valuable lesson. Tropical fish don’t like beer.
LITBMueller
Memories….. light the corner of my mind. Misty water color memories…. Of the way we were…..
There’s a time and place for everything. It’s called college.
I miss those days of drinking crappy beer in kegs and cans. I fondly remember my senior year at a very small college in the Northeast (names have been withheld to protect the innocent!), where the drinkin’ age was 21 and there were no good bars to go to, anyway. So, we had to make our own “good times.”
Our school had a keg ban, so we initially started with just the ole’ cans of beer in big garbage cans trick. Our first party, we bought WAY too much Rolling Rock, and ended up drinking it for next month, trying to finish it off.
Our second party was also a rager – the stuff legends are made of (like, saving our suitemate from hooking up with, shall we say, the wrong girl). Our RA was a real uptight prick. At 2AM, even though things were still rolling, he came ’round to shut us down. We kept saying “OK, sure, dude…” for as long as we could, until he called public safety over, and they kicked everyone out.
We spent the rest of the early AM hours cleaning up, and during a 4AM raid on Dunkin Donuts for ham egs & cheese on croissants, we plotted our revenge: simple, but sweet.
We took one of the big plastic garbage cans full of rolling rock cans, and used them to build a giant wall of Rolling Rock to block the door to his room. We were sure he was in there (probably masturbating) and wished we had a camera to capture the moment when all the cans came tumbling down on film. Oh, well…
At least that did the trick. He didn’t bother us again, until our last rager at the end of Senior year. By this time, we had started ignoring the keg ban, as most people do. But, our RA picked this night to get revenge on us – he had public safety do a “raid.” Unfortunately for him, we had a better relationship with the public safety folks by this point in the year than he did.
Another memory: Naragansset beer. The foulest tasting crap ever put in a can. Made Meister Brau taste good. But, it was the cheapest thing in the store…by far! So, by Sophmore year, it was at every party. That’s part of the reason we shelled out a little more for Rolling Rock (and later MGD and Coors because we were so damn sick of the Rock!).
LITBMueller
Nice one, JWeidner!!! :)
Oooh! A short one before I go home: playing anchorman in a pub in Saratoga Springs, NY (we were 21 and silly). Five guys, all drinking out of a plastic pitcher. The anchorman is left with virtually the whole thing, and of the five of us, he’s the least experienced drinker. Yet, he manages to chug it down in what seemed like record time. He finishes the picther with wide eyes, and a little smile. We begin to cheer! The anchorman barely had put the pitcher down before he had to raise it back to his lips – he puked every ounce of beer right back into it!!
I never saw four guys bolt from a table faster…
Perry Como
Natty Light, bitches! Who’s got the party ball?
Tim F.
I remember standing around a campfire in Colorado on some guy’s wayback spread (they were building a geodesic dome and a ‘hemp’ garden), demented, passing around a bottle of everclear. We would take a big swig, slosh it around in our mouth and spit it into the fire. WHOOSH! Finally I pass the bottle to my buddy Josh. Josh wasn’t so quick on the uptake. He takes a big swig and…gulp. Pause for two beats, and…right back up again. It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, although that was probably chemical as much as anything else.
TXG1112
Went to numerous fraternity keg parties in college. Hundreds of people a dozen (or more) kegs. Good times.
However one of the dumber things we did was after the school banned beer kegs on campus. We took a soda keg, (they have a cork in the side that can be removed) cleaned it out, and added 13 bottles of fruit punch and 3 bottles of Everclear. Punch on Tap! Unfortunately the punch and liquor didn’t mix well, and apparently alcohol is lighter than punch. As kegs draw from the bottom, the concoction proceeded to grow stronger as the night wore on. As you may imagine, people were even more trashed than usual. Entertaining, but I don’t recommend it, unless you like bright red vomit all over your house.
Perry Como
For some reason I have a bottle of everclear in my bar. I’m not really sure why, that stuff is deadly. It was great for making 55 gallon trash cans full of punch though.
Krista
Oh, you don’t need to hear my stories
/grins evilly
stickler
Everclear, my God. The ‘punch’ we made was called Spodie, I think. The memories aren’t very clear. I do distinctly remember learning that it shouldn’t be colored with Grape Kool-Ade. Unless you like that purple pattern on your furniture.
But come on, people, where’s the love for Rainier?
Or Schmidt? “The Brew that Grew with the Great Northwest!” $2.99 for a 12 pack back in the late ’80s. (And brewed in Wisconsin, which made the tagline kind of ridiculous in Washington and Oregon.)
Sal
Doing potatoes. Not homemade liquor, a contest. You’d get under the tap on the keg, and open it to let the beer just flow in while everyone else counted, slowly, one potato, two potato, etc.
I once got up to 20+ potatoes, kind of a zen thing, & could’ve gone longer, but was so far ahead of anyone else I started thinking about how I’d regret going further, & stopped. Some fool went to beat my record though, & did, and regretted it big time.
QuickRob
Ahhhhhh, the party. Excellent description…the sagging floors, the music from upstairs. It’s like I’m back in college and I was only a colleg student like 2 years ago!
The crammed parties, the shitty furniture, the cheap beer, the 2 liter bottles (my two liter came in two pieces and it was my gravity bong!)……and the almighty keg.
Nothing can bring people of different social castes in college together with such slurrish and field-levelling power as a keg.
I sip on my shitty hard cider in the praise of the keg.
Historical Wit
Ahh…Everclear was the magic for the ladies. We called it Jungle Juice. Had a great recipe. 4 gallons of sweet ass kool aid, 2 fifths of everclear, 4 pounds of fruit mix(cut up a pineapple, 5 oranges, throw in some grapes, maybe some apples if your so inclined. Two insulated 5 gallon water coolers of that, a field in a wood area, 50 to 75 people…its been 20 years and people still talk about that shit.
Still have to go with the MGD, no preservatives, no headaches…
TXG1112
Another stupid thing we did in a similar vein to potatoes. We decided to have a kill the keg party. So we got a room full of people (35 or so) and opened the tap and started pouring beers. We turned down the CO2 slightly so we wouldn’t kill ourselves. We didn’t close the tap until the keg was kicked, it took 37 minutes.
We drank some god awful cheap crap in college. The worst I can remember was Stegmeier. while I’ve heard that their porter is good, the lager is terrible. We used to get cases of returnable pint (Yes, Pint!) bottles for $7.50, which includes the $1.50 deposit.
We drank all the crap: Iron City, Natty Bo, Natural Light, Old Milwaukee just to name a few. By my upperclassman days we could afford to get kegs of the good stuff, and owned the correct tap head, handle and spigot for Guinness. We’d get kegs of Bass and make black and tans. Mmmmm.
Krista
Prince Igor vodka was my poison of choice…actually, now that I think of it, that description really is quite accurate.
stickler
Prince Igor! Judas Priest, that brings back some horrific memories. Please never mention his name again.
Brrrr.
Anyway, anybody here ever do the Century Club? 1 oz. beer, every minute, for 100 minutes. Sounds easy. Isn’t.
Or, and here I’m probably dating myself, what about Beer Pong? No overhand, every shot has to be lobbed. No fair playing with decent beer.
The rag you use to clean the ping-pong table is, of course, properly referred to as the Zamboni.
Good times. Too bad about the liver, though.
Krista
Yeah…7-Up Slams with Prince Igor vodka. And that was just to warm us up for going downtown.
Perry Como
Liquor Olympics was probably the worst I’ve ever seen/participated in. Annual event at school. 4 guys per team, 3 regulars and an anchor man. 3 shots, 3 beers per person.
1 shot vodka, slam a beer
1 shot rum, slam a beer
1 shot tequila, slam a beer
Whatever each of the first three didn’t finish, the anchor man had to. I would say good times, but it really wasn’t.
QuickRob
BEER PONG!!!!!!
The only sport I was ever any good at!
We didnt have a rule on “lobbing” but we definitely had a rule on “leaning” in to take a shot.
And of course the rule against blowing out a ball that was circling the rim…although I must admit I think that keeping the ball out of the cup at all costs is justified…rules be damned!
demimondian
Heh. I’m sentitve to alcohol (yes, despite that I brew beer and make wine — I can drink maybe an ounce of wine, and two or three of beer. I don’t get drunk; it just gets hard to breathe. Oh well.) As a consequence of that, I spent a lot of my college life handling people whose drinking games had gotten out of hand. At least one case of alcohol poisoning, the occasional half remembered date rape…
neil
Anyway, anybody here ever do the Century Club? 1 oz. beer, every minute, for 100 minutes. Sounds easy. Isn’t.
I did the math in my head, and it didn’t sound very easy.
MattM
Oh, man. Century Club. One of the hardest parts is actually keeping track of the time.
stickler
The brutal part, of course, is the twenty fraternity brothers keeping track of you and the poor slob you challenged.
Ugh.
stickler
Dude. Where I came from, if you screwed with the ball like that, you were automatically subjected to horrific justice.
We called it “ponding” because we had a pond in front of our house.
Think carefully before you mess with gravity, arc, and the ping pong ball.
rjw
bob
RonB
Stickler, my gang used to have spodie parties too, that is when we weren’t passing around the Jagermeister(which came to be known as “Yahtzeemaster” after the host whose house I first brought it to needed some shorthand to ask for it after a bottle or so). Then there was Flog, played at a Rutgers dorm where you had to navigate 18 rooms of different drinks to get to the keg downstairs. I managed the first one I went to but the next one I ate some ‘shrooms in one of the early rooms and practically blinded myself temporarily because I ate too much. I spent most of the night watching the walls melt and staring blankly at cartoons. Ah, idle youth, where have you gone?
srv
Tim, uh, so I got some Rochefort. What’s the shelf life? What is the ideal serving temp?
srv
Oh, Tim, I forgot. I’m going to Ireland in two weeks. Any exotic breweries I should hit?
Chris P
No respect for the beast? I am shocked and appaled. It is unfortunately the keg of choice at the university of kentucky.
Of course, it did encourage me to begin endulging in bourbon, so I do not bear it all that much ill will.
stickler
srv:
Exotic breweries? Please, please, visit the Guinness brewery. It’s as exotic as you need.
Everything else is either a distillery or superfluous.
For a charming hangover-test, try (as I did) bolting a hefty amount of Irish whiskey, then the next morning mounting — step by step — the causeway up to the Blarney Stone.
Good times. Except for the nausea and vertigo.
Tim F.
srv,
The friendly folks here recommend that you keep Rochefort for <= 5 years and serve it at about 55 fahrenheit. Don't even think of keeping it for longer than a few years, because skunking Rochefort should be a crime. About Ireland, search me. I went to Guinness.
Laura
Everclear is evil. I got out of college unscathed, but not every girl was so lucky. I’d be nervous sending my hypothetical daughter to college knowing that stuff’s still around. It’s just a dangerous combination – freshmen girl, sophomore boy, “punch” that tastes like punch…
On a happier note, one of the more fun (and least embarrassing) drinking experiences of my youth was doing the “Mile of Bars” bike trip on El Cajon Blvd in San Diego. Known for prostitution, it was also a street full of great dive bars. One summer, about a dozen of us rode bikes to the starting point (more than a mile, but “3.5 miles of bars” doesn’t roll off the tongue). On our trip, we stopped at every dive bar for a beer, and sometimes played quarters. One bar was a biker bar. I don’t think they appreciated our bicycles, because they were all knocked over when we left, and one bike had it’s tire sliced (since then, I’ve met some bikers who are the coolest, kindest people you could meet. That crowd just had a “bad apple,” as “they” say). At another bar, their free happy hour food was saltines with bologna and american cheese. We were starving, and poor, so that was the best happier hour food we’d ever had. We wiped them out. On the way home, we were the only bikes or cars (so we thought) on the road, so we all ran a stop light. The siren and red flashing lights followed. Most of our group kept going, but being the good girl, I stopped with about 4 others. We endured a 20-minute lecture on the dangers of drinking and riding bikes and running stop lights. Then the cop gave us warning tickets and we rode home. To this day, I have an affection for dive bars.
Love the stuff! Jagermeister and Tahoe. Now, that’s a perfect combination.
Demento
OK, time to be thoroughly dated in place and time. Coors in a keg (hey, it was local and cheap), major bonfire and the Stones (“Out of Our Heads”, best album evah!.
Keith
I remember MGD being about the best keg for the price back in college. Lone Star also makes for a good, cheap keg, and if you know someone where you get the keg, try Pearl Bock with a Shiner Bock cap on the tap hole.
Laura
Meister Brau was the beer of choice for keg parties when I was in college. It was awful, but cheap. You had to drink a few cups before it was drinkable.
J-Smith
In the bars where I went to school, back when I went to school, you could buy cheap draft (what kind? who cares?) in buckets (~4 gallons.) 3 guys was generally considered the minimum number of participants for a bucket, though my roommate and I did for many betweeen the two of us.
Bob In Pacifica
Couldn’t someone here at the controls of BJuice just type in something like “Saturday Open Thread”?
J-Smith
Everclear has resulted in many a freshman girl “becoming a woman” before she becomes a sophomore.
JimAllen
Freshman year, 1971-2. Draft lottery. My number comes up 193.
One large bottle of vodka. On half gallon of OJ. Celebration commences.
Further details unavailable.
JWeidner
Hey Stickler – been there, done that. But ours was called the 101 Club. 101 shots over 101 minutes. And you’re right, it aint easy, but when you’ve done it, it tends to give you a certain sense of pride…or regret, depending on your ability to handle your beer.
Bob In Pacifica
Okay, winter of 1972-73. In the army. Mixed drinks at the NCO club as low as six cents.
Do the math.
Bill Tucker
I remember throwing a party with my roommate and a couple of people next door. Ten kegs (8 of Shiner Bock, which is, goddammit, the best cheap beer ever, and two of something else for the beer wimps), plus all the stuff people brought with them. We’d invited a local band, Elevator Up, to play. I was outside, chatting with people, and heard live music start, but clearly not Elevator Up. When I went inside, I found another band, the Flying Fish Sailors, who had just showed up and started playing. We figured we had about 500 people there, and even 18 years later I still sometimes hear from people what a great party it was.
Some lessons learned:
If you build a bridge between two houses for partygoers’ convenience, make sure it’s sturdy enough to support as many people as can possibly fit on it, even when they’re jumping up and down.When the cops come by at 4am, for the third time, they are unlikely to be swayed by any answer other than “We’ll turn the music off now.” This goes double if your drunken friend walks up and announces that he’s a lawyer.It’s an excellent idea to check dark corners of your house and yard before everyone leaves, to make sure that the various bodies get taken away. You’ll have enough to deal with when you wake up.That many people, liquid refreshment, and dancing add up to a viscous goo, all over the floor and about two feet up the walls. You can clean it up yourself, but you really won’t feel like it, so it’s best to call in some pros and go have some migas while they do their thing.Enjoy yourself. You’re probably not going to throw many parties that good in your life.
Bill Tucker
Hm. That list of lessons learned was in ul and li tags, and looked like a bulleted list in the preview. Sorry.
tzs
Totally OT, but just got this and thought it should be posted in homage to the amazing flame war in the thread below:
Subject: Changing a Light Bulb
Q: How many subscribers to an email list does it take to change a
light bulb?
1 to change the light bulb and to post that the light bulb has been
changed.
14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the
light bulb could have been changed differently.
7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs.
27 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing light
bulbs.
41 to correct spelling/grammar flames.
6 to argue over whether it’s “lightbulb” or “light bulb” …
Another 6 to condemn those 6 as anal-retentive.
2 industry professionals to inform the group that the proper term is
“lamp”.
27 to post URLs where one can see examples of different light bulbs.
12 to post to the group that they will no longer post because they
cannot handle the light bulb controversy.
4 to suggest that posters request the light bulb FAQ.
44 to ask what is an “FAQ”.
2 to post reasons why the light bulb burning out is the result of a
government conspiracy.
4 to say “didn’t we go through this already a short time ago?”
43 to say “do a Google search on light bulbs”
1 lurker to respond to the original post 6 months from now and start
it all over again…
tzs
Getting back OT, my generation seemed to fall between the “let’s smoke it!” and “let’s drink it!” at the Masochists’ Institute of Technocracy which ended up in sorta the minimum for both mind-bending methods. Many of us grew pot plants in the closets, but the main fun in that was transplanting them into the bushes around the Great Court and seeing how long it took the Campus Police to discover them.
I do remember a few parties–mainly cheap white wine (where did they dig up some of those? Smelled like cat piss) and even cheaper beer. Oh, and one excursion which made everyone’s memory because so-and-so had walked into a liquor store and asked for a quart of their cheapest vodka. (The fact that this was a topic of discussion on the hall for about two weeks gives you an idea of our level of, um, alcoholic savoir-faire.)