An Intense Jager Olympic Week
Now that the week is over I’ve finally had some time to look back and try to soak it all in. And with it over, I can say that it was too much.
The annual Jager Olympic party at The Bunker was this last weekend and it was truely epic. But, of course, in order to get that epic scale it was necessary to do an unprecidented amount of work. That work began last week with the eBay purchase of a new direct draw beer dispenser. It spiraled out of control from there.
The new draft system is a TDD-3 from True Food Service USA, and looks a little something like this:
In fact, it looks very similar, except that our draft system actually has two taps per tower rather than one tap per tower as shown in the photo. Of critical interest to the story is the following two facts: the system is 70″ x 28″ x 37″ in size (without towers) and has a crated weight of 335 pounds. Not really affordable to ship and not easy to move.
The shipping problem was “solved” by Dave and I leaving at 6:00am on Tuesday morning for the distant town of Springdale, Arkansas to pick up the draft system ourselves. We made a solid trip there and just ended up shoving the draft system into the back of his Explorer with a forklift and then heading back to Manhattan (all in one day/night.)
But this was not before making a couple stops in Olathe, KS. With the initial goal of getting some tips from our good friend “Tard” who is a “Beer Man” in Olathe, we also needed to stop by JD Hillen’s parent’s place in order to use their table saw for a few choice cuts. This is because the arrival of the new draft system brought another major project into the fold: the bar was to be expanded.
Another 3 feet of bar was added to the inside edge of the Bunker Bar, no minor feat. In the course of one week, we built a new subfloor, bar support, and bar surface for the Bunker Bar. This included a dismanteling of the existing bar in order to fit the beer draft system in and relocate the mixed drink station’s ice basin and soda gun manifold.
While that would have been more than enough to fill an entire week of labor, there was still vinyl to be made and cut for the Beer Pong and Beer Bong tournaments along with 90 gallons of gelatin to cook for the Jello Wrestling event.
We ran it right up to the wire when the Jager Olympics finally kicked into gear. We were ran absolutely ragged when the event started and continued to do well and scrape by until it was over. The popular consensus is that this year’s Jager Olympics was the most amazing party anyone had ever seen. Which is awesome, that’s what we were going for.
The events were great. The crowd was massive. We managed to down the pallete of Keystone kegs that were purchased (a pallete is 5) and much of the stock of mixed drinks. The bar was ran in part by residents and in part by a crack team of professional bartenders that came in from Aggieville (including the amazing Kate Collins and followed later by Cheri Freund). But when it was all over, we were mostly just tired. Estimations collected by door guards were aggregated and initial numbers suggest that over 800 people crossed the threshhold to the Jager Olympics with a peak of about 275 at any one time. Over 30 rounds of Jello Wrestling took place with every possible combination of male and female contestants in groups of two or three.
As a house, we were a little bit less estatic. The party was great, the numbers speak for themselves, but there were a few things lacking for us. We did way too much work in the week leading up to the party, and as a result the fatigue crept in now and then. The Jello Wrestling was a little ‘out of hand’ as all of the floor surfaces of the house were completely covered. An emergency scrubbing session started at 5:00am and went for a couple hours after we managed to get everyone out of the house.
But most of all, while we had over 800 people at the house, it was surprising to us how many of those people were complete strangers. I worked the front door for about two and a half hours that fell around the time that Aggieville closed. In that entire time one friend from the CS curriculum showed up that I chatted with. Besides that everyone was a blank.
It’s not that we regret having the party, that’s not it at all. It was truely a legendary event. But we are certainly looking forward to limiting the size of future events in some fashion. I long for relatively tame after-parties from Copus concerts and a return of the Beer Pong League that provided great times every single weekend for months without getting a thousand people we don’t know attending.
Of course, during this week there were still work and classes to be handled by all of the residents, so this is just kind of the bulk of the iceburg. I know I’m really happy that it’s over, and I look forward to many more gatherings–of a more controlled nature–at The Bunker.
Now I just want to rest…