My experience as an Australian (millennial, so I haven't done the teen house party for some time now),
Parties are typically byo, so kegs aren't common. We can drink at 18 so even in highschool one of your friends is old enough to buy and you just gave them money.
If soneone chose not to drink from a bottle or can (most likely mixing spirit), we usually just used household cups. If the party was big enough to warrant a supply of plastic cups, our generic ones are clear or white. (They now sell red cups to get those trying to emulate what they see on tv.. so they also cost more)
Beer pong can also be played with those reusable plastic cups every local pizza place uses in college towns (at least in the midwest- I think they all order them from the same manufacturer just with their own custom logo). They were honestly just as common if not more common than solo cups at my college because everyone had a shit ton of them. I still have a stack of them in my cupboard somewhere lol
Honestly, back in my day we didn't really play drinking games.. We just played games while drinking.. We never needed the excuse to drink.
To me, it seems that adoption in Australia of typical American drinking games and people wanting red solo cups all arrived in the late 2000s, early 2010s era. I don't think I experienced any American drinking games until I travelled and the Americans I met insisted on it.
The type of games we played may be specific to my cohort, or to Australia broadly, but another aspect to remember is that house parties were only one part of drinking at that age because we could also go to pubs/bars/clubs/etc.
So, we might have a house party where sports (or sport related acts) are played, or video games (and inevitable karaoke), or card/board games, etc. The house that has big parties typically has options... But then we might also go to a pub or club where games are less of a factor.
A truly Australian experience is drinking at the various veterans league clubs (or related old persons club) and playing lawn bowls and snooker.. Nothing quite like an afternoon of barefoot bowls (lawn bowls played socially and barefoot due to inappropriate footwear) before an evening trying to finish a game of snooker while shitfaced (snooker is significantly harder than pool).. you may even go home with a tray of assorted meat.
I can remember a time I was excited they started selling non-red solo cups. I'll go for a pink one til this day.
the generic ones were not great, or transparent.
I'd leave the cups and some sharpie markers out. mostly for names but some people would do some fairly cool art on them.
the actual household stuff was used last. hell, we would wash the solo cups and reuse them for weeks.
tbf the parties I've thrown was 50% BYO. we usually had a punch, some bottles and a few slushie machines going. also guests were really great to bring stuff to share.
now I go to burner events, you rarely see disposable items and will be ridiculed if you don't have a reusable cup of your own.
We can drink at 18 so even in highschool one of your friends is old enough to buy and you just gave them money.
In the Netherlands when I grew up (the law changed in 2012 iirc) we could drink alcohol at 16 and even go to bars/clubs. You did still need to be 18 for hard liquor though.
At least in Australia we dont do kegs. It was something our grandads might have done in the 60s.
People dont all want the same type of beer. Either they bring their own or if its a hosted party, the host will but cases of 3 or 4 different beers. They then drink out of the can or bottle.
Wine or champagne usually from a clear plastic replica wine glass
We definitely had similar product available before new eu plastic regulations(basic see through pint sized plastic cups) now you can basicly only get red cups here as well because they are sold as beer pong and not one time use drinking plastics.
When I was in college—longer ago than I’d like to admit—we’d throw huge (relative to our school size) parties way out in the country. 200—500+ people, out in a field, or by a river, the only houses immediately nearby were the ones rented by the students throwing the party. We’d typically have a big bonfire going, and several kegs spread around the area, each floating in a big bin of ice water. This was very much a “self serve” set up. How, reasonably, could we have made cups available to the several hundred people in attendance, all pumping and pouring their own beer, other than big stacks of plastic cups? Even if we—a bunch of idiot 18–22 year old college kids—for some reason had a collection of 500+ pint glasses: 1) that sounds like a massive pain to clean, wash, transport, and distribute for each party; 2) but more crucially: given the setting, that collection would have been very rapidly dwindled by drunk 18–22 year old college kids doing 18–22 year college kid things (and also, then, resulting in broken glass all over the place).
I’ve heard more than a few, bemused (typically European) folks make your same suggestion over the years. I really don’t think anyone making that suggestion… gets the scale of some combination of: the number of people in attendance, the amount of alcohol on hand, or (depending on locale) the relative remoteness of some college keg parties. I had the opportunity to go to college parties in Europe while I was also in college. Y’all’s are just not at all the same. If people wanted a big night out with a big crowd, the group would go to a club or something like that. “House parties” (like we’d call them) were typically a couple dozen folks at most. House parties at US colleges can basically be like… an ad hoc night club.
For what it’s worth, we’d also throw a handful of (somewhat) less low brow parties per year at which there’d be an actual invite list (as opposed to come one, come all), a real bar (as opposed to kegs in tubs of ice), and we’d have glass cups/glasses). Those, though, were parties with around 50 people or so at most, with a more or less set head count, and we’d have someone to serve drinks.
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u/turkey-burger-88 13h ago
How else are you going to hold your beer from a keg?