Stein Club Moves Beyond Just Beer

Quincy House residents came to their first-ever Stein Club last Thursday night, prepared for beer and a good time.

Hard-core Quincy folk eschewed the provided plastic in favor of more spirited House steins, while students, tutors and recently appointed House Master Robert R. Kirshner mingled and made merry with cups of Bass Ale.

Kirshner decided this fall that Quincy should join the ranks of the 10 other Houses who host regular stein clubs. Stein clubs are an anomaly in that they are usually the only House-sponsored events that serve alcohol.

But in an age when College administrators are hyper-aware of curbing underage and binge drinking, stein clubs have intentionally shifted from events all about the alcohol to gatherings where members of the House can socialize.

The Houses that sponsor stein clubs set strict rules about who gets to drink, how much and even what kind of beer will be served.

A New Tradition in Quincy

Kirshner says he readily agreed when the Quincy House Committee approached him about starting a Stein Club. He even offered to have the House buy the first keg.

“The only stipulation I made is it had to be a good beer, not Bud Light,” Kirshner said Thursday, holding his “Evolution of the Universe” stein. “It has to be Sam Adams or better. It’s kind of like a low-brow wine tasting.”

But Kirshner says that alcohol is not the main focus of the event.

“The presence of beer is not an extraordinary thing,” he said in an interview before the event. “I’ll be there. The senior tutor will be there. This is not going to be a beer blast.”

Instead, the purpose of Stein Club is to give Quincy residents another opportunity to get to know one another, he says.

Quincy resident Kira C. Whelan ’02 said the event was just what she needed after a busy week.

“It’s a nice end to midterm period, a nice release in the middle of the week,” Whelan said. “We’ve got tutors and the Master and students coming together to chill, instead of studying in their rooms.”

But Stein Club hasn’t always had such a benign nature.

Lowell House Committee Chair Kyle D. Hawkins ’02 says that up until four or five years ago, the Lowell Stein Club was centered solely on alcohol and how much you could drink of it.

In the last two years, he says, the house committee has made a push to change the focus to “having fun.”

“Alcohol is a part of that, but it is not the central focus,” he says. “A lot of people don’t drink at Stein Club. Some people don’t drink because they have a test the next day and some people are not 21.”

To make the events more inclusive for people who do not drink, Hawkins says the house committee makes sure to have plenty of soda, root beer and pizza.

In fact, house committee chairs of houses like Mather, Leverett, Quincy and Lowell say that Stein Club provides a community atmosphere that might otherwise suffer in their bigger Houses.

“Leverett is one of the larger Houses, with more than 400 students, and there are definitely people I’ve met through Stein Club,” says Leverett Stein Club Co-Chair Adam M. Taub ’02, who is also a Crimson editor. “Sometimes you see people in the dining hall, people you’re graduating with, but you don’t ever really have a chance to talk. Stein Club gives you that opportunity.”

Kirshner says that the prospect of more House socializing was one of the main reasons he approved the establishment of a Quincy Stein Club.

“Quincy is a big House. Not everybody knows everybody,” Kirshner says. “The students wanted it as a social event, not as a mechanism for underage drinking, and I think that’s a reasonable thing.”

The two Houses that do not have Stein Club, Adams and Dunster, are smaller and therefore do not need Stein Club to bring residents together, suggests Melissa H. Coleman ’02, co-chair of the Dunster House Committee.

“We’re also a smaller House. We have a smaller community. If you look at the prices of stein clubs it’s easier for Houses like Lowell to have something like that.”

Adams House Committee Chair Benjamin L. Miller ’02 says that while there has been some student interest in an Adams stein club in the past, it has never been a priority for the committee.

We have other outlets,” Miller says. “We have carpe noctem nights where we usually show a movie and chill out.”

Taking the Beer Out of the Stein

“Inclusive” is the new key word for Leverett House Stein Club this year, Taub says.

He says that in the past, it was “nebulous” whether House residents under 21 could attend stein club .

“[Stein club] was a bit closed in the past. It was something we wanted to change,” Taub says.

By placing the emphasis on social interaction and not the alcohol, Kirshner says he hopes Stein Club will be attractive to residents who are not yet 21.

Getting in the door of Stein Club may not guarantee a resident a full stein of beer.

While the Houses do not use one system of carding, all of the House committees that host stein clubs say the events are not a forum for underage drinking.

A key to the success of stein club comes from an understanding between the masters, tutors and students that underage drinking will not be tolerated, they say.

“It’s very clear in the minds of our students that underage drinking would be simply unacceptable and would jeopardize the status of the Stein Club,” says Leverett Senior Tutor Catherine Shapiro.

Mark E. Lee ’01-’02, Quincy House committee co-chair, says that preventing underage drinking and making Stein Club a welcoming environment is a “balancing act.”

“People who are underage have already approached me,” Lee says. “And honestly, we’re not going to be busting people. But they have to understand that the tutors are going to be there, the Master is going to be there and everyone knows who’s under 21.”

The success of Quincy’s Stein Club may hinge on the attitudes of sophomores, he says.

“I’ve been impressed by the sophomore spirit, saying they understand that, hey, they can drink next year,”

Lee says. “Everyone respects what we’re trying to gain.”

At the first Quincy Stein Club event, residents who were 21 got a sticker when they paid their $10 House dues. Before a resident can fill up his stein, he must present his ID with the sticker, which features a stein and a punched-out star.

Kirshner joked that he doubts the house committee will have to resort to ID cards with holograms.

“The House guys have been very responsible and conscientious about making sure the drinking age will be enforced,” he says.

For their first event, the Quincy House committee chairs checked IDs, but Eng-Lee says tutors may do it in the future.

Taub says that it makes the most sense to have the students organizing the event check identification.

“We know most of the people,” Taub says. “We have a feeling for who’s 21, and if we’re not sure we’ll ask them their name. People are pretty honest.”

Taub adds that Leverett House Master Howard Georgi is at most events to back them up.

“The Master is always there to support us,” Taub says. “He’ll have a beer. He knows everyone in the House and knows how old everyone is. [Students] don’t want to break the rules.”

Hawkins says the house committee has streamlined the carding process at Lowell events by simply not allowing any sophomores to drink. But that does not mean underage drinking is easily prevented, Hawkins says.

“One problem that we run into a little is that it’s difficult to stop a senior from getting a beer and giving it to a sophomore,” Hawkins says. “That can happen at an event with a BAT team, that can happen at a bar and that can happen at our Stein Club too.”

Laying Down the Law

The “BAT team” is an organization run by graduate students in Dudley House. For a fee, the team provides people to card students and supervise alcohol at parties.

When Mather reinstated Stein Club on a trial basis last semester, one of the Masters’ stipulations was that BAT would do the carding.

“We thought it was important to have BAT at Stein Club,” Mather Master Leigh Hafrey ’73 says. “Our feeling was it isn’t in the tutor job description to host Stein Club. It doesn’t send the same message to have ho-co checking IDs. It seemed to us a neutral way to make sure the rules were abided by.”

Jenine M. Ghani ’02, chair of the Mather House committee, says she understands Hafrey’s concerns.

“[The Masters] just want to make sure it’s not being used for the wrong reasons and Stein Club’s not an excuse for people to binge drink,” Ghani says. “They’re aware of the things Stein Club can turn into and the parties that have happened in Mather before. You want to take measures against it.”

Ghani also says it was worth the expense of paying the BAT squad $12.50 per hour to watch the keg so that the tutors were not put in a “weird position.”

But house committee chairs of other Houses, however, say that hiring BAT to supervise Stein Club events is counter to the mission of the club.

“It’s too expensive and it’s just more trouble than it’s worth,” says Amanda M. Mulfinger ’02, Cabot House committee co-chair. “Stein Club is a low-key event.”

While BAT mans some stein clubs and house committee members regulate alcohol at others, most Masters and committee chairs agree that tutors should not have the responsibility of enforcing the legal drinking age.

Pforzheimer Master Suzanne McCarthy says that she and her husband decided several years ago to switch from having tutors card to BAT. She says they made the decision because they did not want to burden the tutors.

Hawkins agrees that tutors should just be able to enjoy themselves at Stein Club.

“The reason we don’t have tutors do it is because we think Stein Club is meant to be a friendly, fun atmosphere,” he says. “We think it’s important to have Stein Club be a place at which tutors don’t feel like policemen.”

Whether house committee members, BAT or tutors enforce the drinking age, Stein Club has become a necessary outlet for responsible drinking at Harvard, according to Taub.

“”I do feel one of its purposes is to teach responsible drinking,” Taub says. “Some people have been drinking since they got to college and some people haven’t. Stein Club is an opportunity to show you can just have one drink—you don’t have to drink until you’re drunk.”

—Staff writer Anne K. Kofol can be reached at kofol@fas.harvard.edu.