"Something of the hearty philosophy of that [Colonial] time remains in a tavern motto in old Williamsburg. There where Jefferson once danced with the fair Belina, the motto exhorts the guests to remember that 'Beloved jollity was the offspring of wisdom and good living.'" -- Eloise Davison, Beer in the American Home
"If you want to be a good archeologist, you've got to get out of the library!"--Indiana Jones
One of the primary and most interesting ways people interact with beer, especially high-school- or college-aged people, is, of course, as a social aid. More generally, it is used as a form of self-medication, but this specific use--ingestion on a large scale at a social event of some type due to its extreme tendency to reduce inhibitions and make people more outgoing--is far more interesting to me than others. For example, it is common to self-medicate with beer following a bad breakup or a back-breaking day of toil at a proletarian job, but that role can be filled easily and in a much more healthy fashion by just about anything from food to video games to soccer; using beer instead can be a sign of serious trouble. Beer is at its best as a social aid.
Even more specifically than that, beer-as-a-social-aid often functions as a rite of passage for American adolescents. It's illegal in this country for persons under the age of 21 to obtain or consume alcoholic beverages, but this law ranks up there with jaywalking and filesharing as one of the most commonly broken in existence. If anything, beer's illegality only increases the adolescent party-planner's desire to procure it: in a stage of human development where people tend to lash out at authority in an effort to assert their individuality and break forcibly away from childhood, getting wasted and making some bad decisions can be seen as an extremely strong form of rebellion. Since underage drinking has reached the point in popular culture where it's almost expected, of course, it's debatable whether it's actually a rebellion at all, but it almost certainly is in the minds of the drinkers.
Of course, that's nothing but a conventional-wisdom-based generalization, and if I intend on really studying this kind of beer/human relationship, I'd better be packing something a little more substantial. I had a number of choices regarding how exactly to research something I thought was so self-evident. The first thing that came to mind was to compare a party as experienced by a sober person to a party as experienced by someone who'd pregamed vigorously--to "pregame," in case it's unclear, is to get drunk before even arriving at a party or other event, thus avoiding the slow period at the beginning where you're not drunk yet--but this idea struck me as difficult to make scientifically rigorous. I would either have to designate two different people to be the drunk party-goer and the sober party-goer--two different people who might have differing amounts of fun at the party for reasons entirely unrelated to alcohol--or fill both roles myself at two separate parties, and if one of those two parties turned out to be lame regardless of my current mental state, it'd obviously skew my data. The only way this research method could be viable would be if I used many different test subjects in many different states of inebriation attending many different parties, which in terms of organization and influence is a little beyond the scale of this project. I filed it under "maybe if this were my Master's thesis or something."
Another possible idea was to study the depiction of beer in popular culture (in this case meaning TV shows). Examples: an early episode of Freaks And Geeks entitled Beers And Weirs, in which Lindsay innocently agrees to host a party and her cool but dangerous new friends purchase a keg, which is secretly replaced with unalcoholic beer by her worried little brother to result in an interesting example of the placebo effect; an early episode of Family Guy entitled Wasted Talent in which Peter visits a beer factory in a spoof of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; the movie Beerfest; any given episode of The Simpsons. This would be much easier than the first idea, but of course TV shows do not hold a perfect mirror up to culture as it really is; it's more of a funhouse mirror, showing what it sees fit and distorting everything else. Also, this idea would mean that I would be a college student writing about Family Guy as a final project and I'm not quite comfortable with being that much of a stereotype.
In the end, I decided to generate my own data, not by relying on a drunk person at a party to take notes for me, but simply by going to a frat party and asking people questions. I chose to go to a frat party because, as anyone who has attended college in America can tell you, the fraternity is a youth organization that is singularly obsessed with beer, even to the exclusion of all other alcohols, and presumably the guests at such a party would be those with the greatest history of exposure to it. Specifically, I went to a "basement party" at Brown's chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi. AEPi, the "Jewish frat," has a considerable amount of overlap with the Brown University Band, an organization of which I am a proud member, so I would have some acquaintances at this party; I definitely wanted to avoid being the short guy with glasses walking around with a notebook at a stereotypical jock-filled fraternity where I didn't know anyone, as this might have resulted not only in my failure to procure data but also in physical or emotional harm to me. Basement parties are small and intimate compared to many other frat parties, which would allow me to be heard over the music (in some cases, anyway) and successfully hold the attention of any given guest for long enough to ask them my questions (once again, sadly, only in some cases). This party, in other words, was the natural venue for my survey. I was going in.
Someone took this picture of me at the party. I have no idea who that is in the back.
This was sort of a softball question to start people off comfortably and also to provide context for the next two. Not much more to say about it.
"Be honest. I'm not the cops." It doesn't necessarily follow from the graphs, so I'll just say here that no one told me their first good party was before they first tried beer. The "in a social context" part was added on to avoid answers like "my dad gave me some at the dinner table when I was 9." Can't be too careful. Note that the ranges are mostly the same, and that these two graphs look very similar, which each age on the right corresponding roughly to one year younger on the left. Clearly, trying beer and attending good parties first happen roughly around the same time, even if they're not necessarily simultaneous.
The first of these two graphs is less of a telling blow than it might appear at first--not that many people gave the same answer for the last two questions, really. The majority of those who DID answer that way gave me a very beer-as-a-social-aid friendly answer, though. I think that the reason more people didn't call their first experience with beer a good party is that beer is something of an acquired taste, and 14-18-year-olds aren't exactly known for their ability to acquire high-quality beer. The result is that some people can't really tolerate drinking enough of it their first time trying it to really get anything out of the experience--this is speculation based on my own life experience, though. If I had a chance to do a SECOND survey, I probably would actually ask a question like that. Anyway, at least some of the bad-first-time factor was eliminated by the second of these two questions, which established that the majority of first good parties did in point of fact involve some beer.
The purpose of this question was to determine the general beer-friendliness of the group I was talking to. I chose the word "decent" because good beer and decent liquor tend to be roughly the same price, as opposed to "good" liquor which tends more toward the "prohibitively expensive" side and as such is not exactly analogous to good beer. As you can see, the majority of this group chose "good beer," and such a response from a group of students who are currently attending a party might suggest something about beer's value as a social aid.
Uh. The first question just seemed to suggest itself. Seriously, though, that this vast a majority of the people at this party were currently drunk on beer provides yet more evidence of how important a social aid beer is to the late-teens/early-20s demographic. I feel like I'm starting to repeat myself now.
Buuuut just in case it's not clear yet, let's come right out and ask! Most of the people I approached reacted as though this were kind of a stupid question, so I was kind of embarrassed to admit that it was more or less the entire point of the survey. That's one of the perils of attempting to conduct live research on a topic that is so prominent in conventional wisdom. As you can see, though, the vast majority of people said that beer made them more sociable, and they were unanimous in telling me that they found it made others more sociable.
The point of this question is much less self-evident--note first that this was free-response, not multiple choice, and yet many answers were similar enough that I could categorize them this way rather than having to list them. Notice next that a significant minority named alcohol as a factor in what makes a party. Since one can just as easily drink with a few friends--or by oneself, for that matter--without necessarily calling it a party, it's possible that these people had simply caught on to the general trend my survey was following and were playing along. Now, notice that a slight majority gave an answer I could categorize as "extended social network," meaning that at a party the host, or any given guest, will necessarily not know the majority of people present, and that the point of a party is to socialize with new people and, well, extend one's social network. Taking as context what these same people had said earlier about sociability and beer, this should give you an idea of how important beer is to the college party scene, but if you have any access at all to Conventional Wisdom, you probably already knew that.
At this point in the survey, I asked the guests to recall the best party they'd ever been to, and tell me what made it so great. Then I dropped the bombshell. I asked them to imagine that they were at that very same party, and everything was the same except that there was no beer. Which led to the following questions:
These parties tended to be good for reasons entirely unrelated to beer, with the exception of one that had apparently stuck in the person's mind due to a particularly epic Beirut tournament, which made it a bit more surprising that the majority of people told me that, in the absence of beer, their most memorable party would no longer qualify as such. The majority would still have classified these parties as "good," but the fact that that majority could not be accurately described as "overwhelming" says a lot about beer's value as a social aid.
As you can see, the result of my painstaking research makes a very strong case for beer being an important social aid to the late-teens/early-20s demographic, and their association between it and their post-adolescent social lives makes a good case for it being an important rite of passage as well. Breathtaking. This research didn't feel all that rewarding to me; I came away from it not really knowing anything I hadn't known before and with a vague sense of having wasted my time. Unfortunately, it was necessary to carry it out in order to make claims like I did at the top of this page. Academia is a stern mistress. Quite frankly, though, I would rather have spent that evening drinking beer with my new friends instead of asking them questions. Maybe that says more than every question I asked combined.
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