(AP) Princeton – Last week, when José Ramirez began digging the foundation for planned renovations to Princeton’s Tiger Inn Eating Club, he was much abashed to discover his drill propelled into the air. Says Ramirez, “One minute the drill was going down smoothly, the next it was flying out of my hands… I only had enough time to pull my arms out of the way.”It was only hours after the initial shock that José realized the enormity of his discovery. He had hit surface beer. As he stood there, a column of the sticky brown liquid showered down on him, soaking him to the bone and staining his clothing a dark brown hue.
Members of the Tiger Inn were quick to respond to the geyser spewing in their backyard. Within the hour, they had called in engineers to plug the cascade and scientists from the Princeton chemistry lab to run chemical analysis on the mystery liquid. Preliminary tests of the sample revealed the substance to be surface beer, or “beer foam,” as it is called in the industry. Surface beer almost always indicates that a beer field is harbored far below the surface. So the scientists took a sonar map of the ground below Tiger Inn. The results revealed a massive quantity of beer, welled under Tiger Inn’s property. Estimates vary, but it is believed that the field has enough beer to fill 600,000 kegs a day for at least the next decade – a daily value that could satisfy daily beer consumption in Germany! One scientist who performed the test revealed to me, “Tiger Inn is lucky that they discovered this well when they did. The pressure on this baby could have simultaneously thrown beer on all of the students walking around Princeton’s campus! We’re talking about the equivalent of a beer volcano here.”
How and when did such a large reservoir come into existence? Scientists believe that the beer reservoir began to fill during the last epoch of the Wilsonian Era. Through core samples of the earth below Tiger Inn, they have discovered bands where the soil is stained with beer and traces of another compound know to accompany beer known as shame. These bands correspond to the “State Night period” of the post-Einsteinian era of the University. During “State Night,” large quantities of beer were incorporated into the surface soil. Over the course of time, sedimentation buried the mixture, which was compressed by the heavy foot-traffic of male Brodontesauruses wandering aimlessly around TI hoping to get laid. This pressure forced molecules to combine resulting in “crude beer.”
Tiger Inn believes that the beer well will be extremely profitable for the club, despite further chemical analysis indicating that the beer is low-grade. This means that additives are necessary to ensure the product’s usefulness.
“There is great demand for cheap beer around the world. People need to quit being so snobbish about their beer and realize that both the low and high quality stuff get the job done,” said a member of T.I., speaking on condition of anonymity.
Tiger Inn also has exclusive mineral rights to the well, which strangely enough lies completely within their property. Not a keg’s worth lies beneath next door Colonial Club or the Lewis Center for the Arts. But many refiners are trying to induce Tiger Inn to sell those rights. The most persistent bidder has been the Miller Refining corporation, producer of a product known as Miwaulkee’s Best – rated one of the lowest quality beers on the market. Miller has offered to extract the beer below Tiger Inn with their state of the art drilling technology and replace Tiger Inn’s broken taps with a beer river complete with emergency bilge pumps. As of yet, Tiger Inn continues to refuse Miller’s offers, which has angered Miller greatly. Miller’s CEO had this warning for Tiger Inn: “If you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and I have a straw and my straw reaches across the room and starts to drink your milkshake. I drink your milkshake! I drink it up! There will be alcohol!”
-von Germanberg ’13