This year I was lucky enough to get St. Patty's Day off of work. Naturally I wound up taking advantage of this year's warm weather and went up midday to get some spring slush turns in on the mountain. I found out early last week that the TBar, our local "Five star dive bar" was hosting a Quaffing tournament...
Quaffing...
"What in the world is that?" Is exactly what I asked one of the employees while wandering through a few days prior to the event. He said it's a "real" sport that's played at many resorts and even internationally. After a little research (thank you Dictionary.com) I found out that quaff is another word for drink, or the act of drinking. It was new to me, but I certainly felt it was a great time to pull out my camera and take a few pictures.
The game is played tournament style. I didn't catch on very well to the rules and technicalities, but as far as I understand it works similar to a bracket until a team is pronounced the winner. What I understand is the winning team is the team that guzzles the most amount of beer in the allotted time. The game is played over about a six foot table covered in a sheet of hard plastic. The table is greased down and set up next to a kegerator. Heavy glass mugs are filled about a quarter with beer.
There's official judges with stop watches monitoring each round. There's 4 members to each team. The round starts with three members lined up at the keg table, and one at the other and of the table ready to catch and quaff. The rounds are brief; only a couple minutes. At first whistle, the first member grabs a mug and flings it with force across the table's slick surface. One rule I did pick up on is that the mug has to fly at minimum 2 feet off the other end of the table. That's when your teammate is responsible for catching the mug and quaffing the beer. Once you've swallowed the last drop you slam it's base on the table to let your next teammate know that they can fling the next beer; essentially passing the baton.
As an observer, it looked like an interesting version of shuffle board played through speed rounds with beer instead of pucks. Once it was down to just two teams, they did a face off for the 2017 championship belt.
And we have the winners! ...
I'm not sure if I'll ever participate in the sport of Quaffing, but it surely was fun to spectate and obviously the participants had a blast.