Seniors resurrect Easter tradition, hide beer cans
By John Jacobson
While most children were finding candy-filled Easter eggs this spring, Earlham students searched campus for painted beer cans, continuing the timehonored tradition of Beerster.
Beerster is a holiday that is celebrated on Earlham’s campus around the same time as Easter. The senior class paints beer cans, setting them out to dry and then dividing up the beers between a number of different seniors. These seniors then place cans all over campus, including the dorms, the academic buildings, even Runyan.
This is done for the purpose of finding, keeping and consuming the beers. This year’s Beerster was conducted shortly after the Easter holiday took place, but happened nonetheless.
“I think it’s just a fun thing that brings people together once a year,” said senior Casey Muyskens-Toth. “What’s the harm in it, really?”
Senior Miranda Trostle said, “[Beerster] is just sort of this organic thing that just happens when friends get together and decide that students should be finding more happy surprises around campus.”
Trostle discussed her own involvement with this year’s Beerster.
“We painted the beers at my off-campus house,” she said. “I helped write things on the beers and helped climb some trees [to place the cans].”
“We hid a bunch of beer in the science library and Stanley Hall, as well as wellness hall and Noyes Hall,” said senior Austin Price Miller. “We used … cunning and strategy rather than physical prowess to hide our beers … most were just cleverly hidden, but not hard to get to.”
Trostle claimed that Beerster has been going on for over four years, but when asked about how old people thought this specific tradition was, no one could give a real definitive answer.
“I’d guess maybe fifteen years,” Miller said.
Trostle said that the point of Beerster was “to show the campus that the seniors love everyone and that they want them to drink more beer.”
“In my time here, Beerster always seemed to me to be a scavenger hunt for the security officers,” said Jason Elliot, officer at Campus Safety and Security. “This year, nobody on third shift seemed to find anything, so we thought it was not gonna happen.”
However, the seniors didn’t take long to disprove that theory.
“I got a call today that some were found by some second graders, in the museum in some of the public displays in the museum … and then I heard there were a couple in the registrars office … so I think who ever did it this year did it while places were open, so they were pretty sneaky about it,” Elliot said. “Obviously Earlham’s a dry campus, but it’s a pretty harmless event.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
