DEFINITION

What the hell is Beer Olympics and why are we doing it? Ah yes, those are the important questions that I’ve been pondering this past year. Defining Beer Olympics is easy: a series of games involving the consumption of beer played by groups of people. UrbanDictionary.com defines Beer Olympics as

“[consisting] of multiple beer related events in which teams compete to win the Beer Olympics Gold Medal…Teams compete for points in each event and the winner is named at the end of the event and is named Beer Olympics Champion for that year.”

There are currently no set standards to the structure of Beer Olympics. Each group of people use different combinations of games, different rules, and generally personalize the basic idea to suite their tastes. A quick search on YouTube reveals 575 related videos to watch (it would have been 577 if they didn’t remove our first video collage, which will be posted here soon).

BIRTH

The immaculate conception of our interpretation of Beer Olympics can be traced back to the Spring of 2007 at Green Turtle in Columbia, Maryland. It was a “grab a beer or two” type of evening since Yohan was leaving for New York the next morning that turned into a 6-hour marathon of pints and pitchers. Everything started once he told us about the last Winter Wonderland of Fun (WWF7) trip our Penn State friends had in the Poconos. From there, ideas snowballed, committees were formed, and Beer Olympics 2007 Deep Creek was born.

HISTORY

So far, we’ve held two Beer Olympics events – one in Deep Creek Lake, Maryland and the other in the Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania. We had so much fun at Deep Creek that we pushed to have another just five months later in November 2007 in the Poconos.

Beer Olympics I was a definite success. Sure, there were problems (arguments over rules, exhaustion because of 13 hours of events/drinking, noise violation warnings, etc.), but things went more smoothly than we could have imagined. We ate like kings – pasta with red-wine marinara and yo-spice, ribs, bbq chicken, a breakfast buffet, dengah-jigae, and most other grilled favorites.

Beer Olympics II, on the other hand, was a little different. First of all, having the event in the winter was …interesting. Twenty-six people confined to a 5-bedroom house creates issues we never could have foreseen. It was also a 2-night trip compared the 3-nights we had at Deep Creek. It doesn’t seem like much of a difference, but the extra Thursday of preparation (and just settling in) slowed things down a lot.  In the Poconos, most people got there by Friday night, so we only had one full day. And this Beer Olympics was, well, grimy. We ran through the motions of planning, but didn’t actually plan. We made lists for food, but didn’t plan who’d cook it. Beer Olympics II was all about the games and competition. It was business as usual when came to the events, but it was still over 12 hours grueling hours.

PROCESS

A month or two before the event, the planning begins. The excitement builds as we build the roster,  make teams, clarify rules, plan meals, hand-make trophies, and find the venue. In addition to ridiculous amounts of e-mail threads getting input from most participants and the face-to-face meetings (draft day + games rules), this blog is another attempt to make communication easier and simpler.

INTENTIONS

Of course Beer Olympics isn’t our original idea, but I feel like we’re starting to make it our own. The basic idea is to get all of our friends together in an isolated place, escape the “daily drudge” of every day life, hang out without thinking about anything but drinking, chilling, and eating.

If you were to ask me, “But why do you do all of this? What’s the point?” I’m not sure what I would say. I’ve thought and thought about this, and to be honest, I can’t really come up with something. It’s not that I don’t know, because I’m pretty sure I do. It’s just that I don’t know how to articulate what I feel when I think about Beer Olympics. I’m not trying to intellectualize something that can’t or shouldn’t be broken down or analyzed. I know I’m doing this for a reason, I just can’t explain it yet. There’s something here – somewhere between planning and seeing all my friends – that gives me a satisfaction or feeling I like. So, until I can explain it or until I feel like it requires no further exploration, I’d like to keep doing it. It will evolve, just like me (hopefully I’m evolving…ha) and this site, and my only hope is that it’ll always be fun.

So for now, I’m onto developing other parts of this site, making Beer Olympics better than ever, and learning everything I can from everything I do. Thanks for reading, check back as often as you can, and hopefully I’ll see you at Beer Olympics 3.

chris_capizzi