If there are two beverages most commonly associated with college life, they’re coffee and beer. This makes sense, as they go hand in hand with the two most common practices of college life: working hard and playing hard. What, then, is it about these two drinks that they have come to be so central to our lives that it is difficult (impossible?) to imagine college without them?

With this in mind, I set out to take an in-depth look at how and why coffee and beer operate, together and separately, and to find out what real live students had to say.

Mikey Gaertner Coffee and beer: lovers like Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

But first, here’s a little history of these two enormously popular beverages:

Despite what Starbucks would like to claim, the first actual record of coffee drinking comes from eighth-century Yemen. Curiously enough, at almost exactly the same time, the practice of making beer with hops arose in a French abbey. Beer, or ale, was a big hit in Europe and it didn’t take long for breweries and pubs to spring up all over the continent (mostly in monasteries and church lands at first). Though slow to catch up with their alcoholic counterparts, coffee and coffeehouses exploded in popularity in the 17th century. In England these were known as "penny universities," so called, our sources at smellthecoffee.com tell us, because "a person could buy a cup of coffee for one cent and learn more at a coffeehouse than in class." Turns out, the London Stock Exchange itself grew out of a coffeehouse. (The wide popularity and influence of beer drinking and the pub in England have been extensively documented.)

Since their origins, both drinks have maintained a constant presence in the Western World, increasing in popularity. (In America, coffee did undergo a brief, dramatic drop in popularity in the late Eighties before dynasties like Starbucks and Caribou stepped in and sold it to the "young folks." Beer, however, has never suffered.) Both beverages readily caught the public’s imagination, developing their own set of stereotypes, myths and mystiques- their own "sheiks." Finally, as a sure sign of their appeal, both have been the target of repeated movements to have them banned.

For the most part, the appeal of coffee and beer is the same for college students as for the wider world. However, the strange combination of academic stress and forced socialization found in a college community do serve to attach distinct roles to both beverages.

To many people, drinking coffee acts as a kind of signal: if you drink the coffee, the work will get done. Who doesn’t know at least one person for whom the "after-dinner coffee" means work time? Taken to the extreme, this link can become so strong that coffee can almost become a prerequisite for work. (If I failed to mention it earlier, both beverages in question here are known to be addictive.)

Though many people drink coffee on the weekends or in the mornings, its special college function seems to be that of a "work-enabler." Moreover, since it is already separately related to both work and socialization, "going to coffee" pulls off the amazing trick of making studying seem like socialization and making break time seem justified–even necessary.

Coffee is perhaps, above all, part and parcel of what one sophomore labeled the "anti-sleep lifestyle" so prevalent here. College students are not known for getting very much sleep. In fact, anyone who has ever spent a few weeks in a freshman dorm knows that there is anticipation, almost excitement, about sleep deprivation. It’s as if all-nighters and groggy morning can make a "real college kid" out of recent high school grads.

The "anti-sleep" idea is supported by the fact that, in over half of the interviews I conducted, the interviewee automatically related coffee back to other "anti-sleep" tactics, labeling it as the preferred method. One Pomona junior said: "Coffee is not necessarily my preferred upper. Beer is not necessarily my preferred downer. But, to settle for a legal happy medium…" The same junior also mentioned that he had "heard that when you’re addicted to No-Doz in high school, coffee doesn’t do that much for you." Coffee fits nicely into a world where it is not only convenient, but also (in the first year at least) kind of cool not to sleep that often.

Beer’s place on college campuses needs virtually no elucidation: people like to get intoxicated. After the work, comes beer. It’s a reward after the books are closed and is accordingly a significant hallmark of Pomona students’ non-academic time. Most of us have experienced the following: turning in the paper at five and heading home, or to the Wash, for a celebratory beer (or eight). Similar behavior is in no way limited to the weekends: thanks to fraternity socials and CCLA events, beer is available (to those interested parties bearing proper identification) at least five nights a week. Unlike coffee, which has both academic and social affiliations, beer mostly stays within the social, relaxed realm.

(I spoke with a few people who argued for beer as a work related drink. One junior among these noted that "vodka is better for work purposes," but that beer was an acceptable substitute. When asked how this was the case, the junior responded, approximately," . . .um . . .relieeeves. . .tension…..[silence]." However, while it is not completely unusual for people to have a beer or two while writing a paper or doing reading, neither is it at all usual.)

Does beer serve a parallel "enabling" function to that of coffee? Do we college students start drinking beer in the same way that we drink coffee–as a signal? Now, I won’t have been the first to notice the excessive and constant drinking that goes on at Pomona, and I certainly won’t have been the first to say that beer is the only main draw at most, or all, of the college endorsed events. Perhaps, though, this behavior is only problematic in that it is a symptom of our paired urges to maximize both our efficiency and our fun and to self-medicate or self-maintain.

The response was astounding: "Beer is better!" said one Pitzer sophomore, and she was not the only one. Bottom line? Coffee and beer are both well-entrenched, well-loved institutions–in college and beyond. And drinking either to excess will make you very, very sick.