In spring 1979, University of Montana (UM) president Richard Bowers met with a student, Bob McCue, to deliver some bad news. Beyond his studies, McCue served as chairman of the Missoula Liquid Assets Corporation (MLAC), a private, student-run organization dedicated to hosting an annual fundraiser for the UM Library. Despite the impressive amount of money MLAC had raised over the past seven years, Bowers now viewed its creative way of serving the university and its Missoula community as more trouble than it was worth. He made it clear to McCue that the college would no longer play any part in MLAC's activities.
McCue left, undoubtedly feeling a little frustrated. The meeting with Bowers piled on a full plate of issues he and MLAC's board faced, which included a growing faction of local residents pressuring Missoula’s government to get their fundraising event canceled. Without consulting the rest of MLAC, McCue visited the printing company making event posters and ordered a change: The eighth annual Aber Day Kegger—where nationally known musical acts, roughly 1,000 kegs of beer, and up to 10,000 young revelers came together on a Montana hillside—would now be the last.
From 1972 to 1979, the Library Kegger (which became known unofficially as the “Aber Day Kegger”) grew from an improvised beer bash into one of the most iconic college events in the American West. It was a simple concept—combine friends, great music, and unlimited beer to support a good cause. The only problem was that it continually got wrapped in outsized complexity. And as the Kegger grew in size and attention, its momentum and friction alike followed nationwide shifts in youth drinking culture, beer marketing strategies, and generational politics whose ebb and flow made the party possible, then unmade it just as easily.
The Aber Day Kegger started, ironically, as homework. University of Montana sociology professor Marty Baker asked his students to pursue service projects in their community. A group of men and women, led by entrepreneurial upperclassman Clark Hanson, focused on the school’s beleaguered library.
Libraries are the lifeblood of any university, and that went double in pre-internet days. UM's collections were so deficient at the time that the library risked losing its accreditation. The university had raised about $120,000 (about $877,000 today) for new books, mainly by appealing to alumni and asking students to hit up their parents, but a lot more was needed. Kathy Root, part of that original student group, recalled in a 2009 documentary that they worried that a defunct library might hinder their education and future job prospects. Their solution was to hold a benefit kegger: Get some beer kegs, some live music, sell tickets, and give the money to the library.
The concept was more provocative than it sounds. Keggers were a controversial trend in Montana and beyond. If you've seen the classic film “Dazed and Confused,” you know the drill: A group of youngsters pitch in to buy a keg or two from a bar or liquor store, cart it out to the woods that weekend, and have a blast. A surge in political engagement among American youth gave keggers a boost in the early 1970s. Via movements for rights for the marginalized, hippie counterculture, and protests against the Vietnam War and military draft, large swaths of young Baby Boomers envisioned new political and cultural possibilities for themselves. Among their victories was the 26th amendment to the Constitution, which lowered the voting age to 18 nationally in 1971. As the slogan went: "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote."
That saying soon morphed into "old enough to vote, old enough to drink." Until then, most states and the District of Columbia kept their drinking ages at 21, with occasional exceptions for beer. In the early 1970s, 28 states lowered their drinking ages to some extent, often to 18. It's no wonder that per capita beer consumption in the United States, from all legal ages, jumped 25% from 1965 to 1975. The drinking age in Montana lowered to 19 in 1971, then to 18 in 1973. That set up the Aber Day Kegger to be a raucous time for nearly every student on UM’s campus.
Parents, school officials, and law enforcement fretted over keggers and youth drinking. Montana cops raided keggers, trying (and usually failing) to round up underage drinkers. Almost overnight, many of the so-called “kids” at these parties became legal adults and drinkers. Virtually all of UM's student body became empowered to drink just in time for a library benefit kegger.
Hanson, Root, and the rest of their group cobbled the first kegger together on the fly. Someone knew a local band, who knew other bands. They used connections to meet Earl Sherron, a local distributor for Olympia Brewing, who agreed to sell them beer on contingency. Despite being a dry campus that couldn't officially sanction a party featuring booze, UM officials lent the student group a flatbed truck to serve as a music stage, and even provided free coffee. Throw in some off-duty sheriff's deputies for security, a first aid tent, and fraternity members to direct parking, and the kegger was in business. To manage everything, the students formed the University Liquid Assets Corporation (ULAC).
ULAC chose Bonner Flats, a meadow and known kegger hotspot east of Missoula, and spread the word. On June 1, 1972, a person could pay just $2 to hear six bands from Montana, Washington State, and Oregon, and enjoy all the Olympia beer they could drink. No wonder 3,000 people showed up.
The first kegger wasn't exactly a well-oiled machine. Two ULAC members collected money at the gate—"taking money and eating dust," as member Kathy Bender Means later recalled—while others scrambled around the perimeter, trying to keep people from sneaking in. The road to Bonner Flats couldn't accommodate Sherron's delivery truck, so his crew loaded a pickup 20 kegs at a time. Yet for all that beer, there wasn't a single restroom. When partiers had to relieve themselves, they simply walked into the forest.
But it was fun. The bands played into the evening, until the wall of evergreen trees around them faded into black silhouettes. The party didn’t stop until the beer ran out. The following Monday, ULAC members walked into a Missoula bank with thousands of dollars in singles, and asked to open a bank account.
The event netted $1,575 (nearly $11,000 today) for the University of Montana Library in a single day, so they planned another party. The 1973 kegger essentially repeated the first but with double the Olympia beer, an extra thousand attendees, and $2,881 (over $20,000 today) for the library.
The most significant development that year was that the kegger coincided with the revival of a unique UM tradition: Aber Day. Named after William Aber, a founding UM professor known for cleaning up campus in his spare time, Aber Day was a day of service. The university would cancel classes and organize groups of students to beautify the campus as a springtime rejuvenation. It's a wonderful concept, but the holiday was abandoned in the 1950s because students habitually blew off the work to party instead. While students in the early 1970s still enjoyed a good party, the same passions for civic participation and social impact that inspired the kegger separately led UM's student government to ask administrators to resurrect Aber Day.
Aber Day was a hit, with some 2,500 students and faculty participating in the campus cleanup and subsequent festivities. ULAC, some of whose members also helped organize Aber Day, tried to bring its kegger onto campus as an official Aber Day event. When the university declined, probably to avoid sanctioning excessive student drinking, the organizers held it that afternoon anyway. The association stuck. Even with no official link, ULAC's little party became known colloquially as the Aber Day Kegger. It soon grew a lot bigger.
The kegger soon outgrew Bonner Flats, which had inadequate (and possibly unsafe) roads and made it difficult to accommodate increasing crowds amongst more stages and bathrooms. So, ULAC members shopped around. In 1975, they began renting the K-O Rodeo grounds south of Missoula, off Miller Creek Road. Each year they got more organized than before. Subcommittees divided up tasks like renting portable toilets (no more using the woods), hiring more off-duty sheriff deputies for security, and tapping fraternities and sororities for labor. They also created one of the kegger's most iconic features, the half-gallon souvenir pitcher. The move cut down on waste and long beer lines, but measuring portions by the pitcher also symbolized the excessive, uninhibited tone of the occasion. Admission, remember, covered all the beer you could drink.
ULAC put the grounds' existing fencing to good use. The beer truck arrived early in the morning and backed right up to a cattle chute. Dozens of workers lined up, rolling hundreds of kegs between their legs. Three tapped kegs would be packed with ice into a stock tank—a steel drinking trough for livestock—along the corral fence, then each was linked to three or four additional kegs. These daisy chains continually refilled the lead kegs. When the rear ones kicked, they could be replaced without interrupting flow at the taps.
Staff members sat on the lead kegs in a great phalanx, pouring beer through the fencing to the never-ending horde of drinkers funneling into another cattle chute on the other side. People in line were known to moo. So much beer spilled around the taps that attendees refilled in ankle-deep mud … beer mud.
“People in line were known to moo. So much beer spilled around the taps that attendees refilled in ankle-deep mud … beer mud.”
The landscape brought beer and music together in a transformative way. The hills around the rodeo grounds formed a natural amphitheater for the main stage. Attendees unfurled blankets, pitched tents, and occasionally hauled in sofas to settle in for the day. The occasional Confederate battle flag could be seen through wafting clouds of marijuana smoke. Thousands danced for hours to rock, blues, country, and bluegrass music. The kegger lucked into clear skies most years, so all the activity kicked up enormous amounts of dust. When people inevitably poured beer on each other, the dust would coat their skin and clothing. It was all part of the vibe. Woodstock met the West in Missoula, Montana.
The increasing popularity of the kegger also attracted bigger music acts. Elvin Bishop, Jerry Jeff Walker, Heart, Jimmy Buffet and the Coral Reefer Band, Bonnie Raitt, and others all graced the kegger stage at least once between 1974 and 1979. A perennial crowd pleaser, however, was the locally based Mission Mountain Wood Band.
All this star power boosted the crowds. About 4,000 people attended the 1973 kegger, then 8,000 in 1974. Ten thousand showed up in 1975, from not only Montana but all over the West Coast—from southern California to British Columbia. Donations got bigger too. The first kegger had taken in $1,575 for the UM Library. The next year it was almost $2,900, then $6,300 in 1975, and $11,250 in 1976, a collective sum to that point of about $136,000 in today’s dollars. ULAC became the book fund's largest individual donor. Each year, ULAC organizers would print the donation amount on a beer keg and present it publicly to the university. Supposedly, the keg itself was a real, negotiable check. How the university endorsed it, though, remains a mystery.
The kegger's high profile also earned a lot of support from the university and community. Banks sent tellers to help count all those singles and fives. Local record stores and the UM box office facilitated ticket sales. More university administrators, from events and programming to food and medical services, lent helping hands. At least one ULAC student, distracted from their schoolwork by kegger planning, got a pass from their professors.
ULAC responded with more than just gratitude. Starting in 1975, the organization began donating roughly 25% of kegger proceeds—around $1,000-$3,000 each year—to various causes around Missoula, in addition to the university library. Spreading the love came from a place of generosity, but the ULAC students also understood the value of choosing their donation recipients and business partners wisely. A regular recipient was a youth summer camp organized by the Missoula sheriff's department, whose deputies provided kegger security. In the 2009 documentary, ULAC member Tom Staples recalled, "we were not shy that we could play a political game."
Probably the kegger's biggest fan was Earl Sherron. However much ULAC donated in a given year, they shelled out more to his distributorship for Olympia beer—often over $20,000. Unsurprisingly, they began receiving beer samples from every major beer brand active in Montana. ULAC was part of another, much larger game in the beer space.
Breweries always jockey for market share, but the 1970s saw a particularly intense period of market competition and consolidation. When new drinking age laws thrust 18-20-year-olds into play, colleges became a major theater. Breweries, either directly or through distributorships, saturated campuses with free beer and merchandise. They arranged 10-cent, 5-cent, and even penny beer nights at local bars. They hired students as brand representatives to build relationships with student governments, clubs, and rambunctious Greek organizations that might drain 10-25 kegs over a weekend. Major brands each sponsored hundreds of college sports programs around the country. Add in intramural leagues, watermelon bashes, wet T-shirt contests, concerts, and even turtle races in barrooms.
It wasn't about immediate profit. Sales near colleges remained a small percentage of total business for breweries, and sponsored events often didn't even pay for themselves in beer sales. Instead, they put banners on the quad and posters on dorm room walls. The goal was to instill taste preferences and brand loyalty that would last an alcohol-consuming lifetime. As an Anheuser-Busch spokesperson put it in 1978, when the company was buying rounds for Spring Breakers in Daytona Beach: "The young adult market is very important to us. And this is the time to get them loyal to your product. …The kids loved it."
Olympia played this game with the Aber Day Kegger too. It employed a UM campus representative to help Earl Sherron manage the account. Branded cups, shirts, trucks, and more were visible at every kegger. In 1976 and 1978, Olympia profiled the event in its distributor newsletter as inspiration, telling readers that the kegger proved "live music from top-name artists, pitchers of Olympia beer, good fun and the wide open [sic] Montana countryside blend best." In 1979, Olympia published advice on how other distributors could organize similar college keggers in their territory, suggesting local reps "get a local group such as college students … to sponsor the event and donate profits to charity," and quoting Olympia's district manager for Missoula that "[i]t is important that the local police feel comfortable about the event and are willing to help." Breweries' cultivation of college drinking added to the broader social tailwinds behind the Aber Day Kegger, which also allowed ULAC to brush off the growing number of local complaints against it. For all its fans and allies, the kegger alienated plenty of other Missoulians.
"And so they came," local resident Henry Murray wrote to the Missoulian newspaper in 1975, "... Drawn like a swarm of lemmings in their relentless march to self-destruction, they converged on Missoula for the annual University 'kegger happening.' For the sum of five dollars they could drink themselves into a sodden mess."
“For the sum of five dollars they could drink themselves into a sodden mess.”
“Mess” was a common descriptor. Missoulians along Miller Creek Road were especially frustrated. Miles of traffic to and from the event prevented residents from getting to work and their kids from getting to school. Attendees often hopped out of their cars to relieve themselves in resident's yards. Hundreds of gatecrashers cut across property, sometimes with motorcycles and trucks, causing damage along the way. In one extreme case, a young man drunkenly broke down a local woman's door. The woman fled with her child and called the police, who found the man asleep on her couch.
Another common complaint was drunk driving. Residents accused the sheriffs of declaring "a moratorium on drunken driving for a day." In 1976, a 14-year-old girl who lived along Miller Creek was struck by a drunk driver from the kegger. She lived but spent several weeks in the hospital.
By official numbers, the kegger led to few arrests, injuries, or incidents of any kind. While discretion exercised by law enforcement was certainly a factor, ULAC also went to great lengths to mitigate disorder. Members went door to door, asking residents for feedback. They worked with the county to ensure school buses and emergency vehicles had access to Miller Creek Road. They assigned security to patrol the perimeter and added parking fees to encourage carpooling. Every year, many Missoulians—even Miller Creek residents—agreed that the kegger's safety and security improved. But all these problems persisted—trespassing, traffic, lewd behavior, drunkenness—and so complaints did, too.
For years, it was easy to manage or even dismiss malcontents. ULAC's first attempted donation beyond the UM library in 1975 was to the Missoula City-County Library, whose director refused it, saying "that kind of activity is not good for the image of the library." Clark Hanson, still leading ULAC at that point, snapped back to reporters, "... the hell with them. If they don't want the money, we will give it to another organization." Indeed, ULAC soon had requests from 17 local charities, all hoping for a cut of the kegger's proceeds.
Both ULAC and the university brushed aside suggestions that the annual event be held on the UM campus. No explicit reason was given, but whenever UM faced criticism for its association with the party fundraiser, administrators would insist that they were not responsible for private events held off-campus. A degree of separation seemed critically important to the university. The Aber Day Kegger, as a nexus of youthful idealism and binge drinking, stood alone. It would therefore bear any fallout alone.
At first, that didn't seem to matter. The kegger kept gaining momentum. ULAC intentionally kept attendance around 10,000 but continued to refine the safety, sanitation, and organization of the event. Tickets were sold throughout Montana and even parts of Idaho and Washington. Famous musicians continued to perform, giving voice to the kegger's country western take on Baby Boomer individualism.
The kegger also commanded a loyal fanbase. After years of luck with good weather, the 1978 kegger suffered 50-degree temperatures and steady rain. The party barely slowed down. In The Missoulian, Gordon Dillow wrote that "Complaints about the weather were invariably greeted with sage advice, 'drink enough beer and you won't even notice it.'"
“Complaints about the weather were invariably greeted with sage advice, ‘drink enough beer and you won’t even notice it.’”
Fans also tolerated ticket prices that, true to form in a decade of sustained inflation, increased every year. From $2 in 1972, tickets were $9 in advance and $12 at the gate by 1979. It was still a great deal—equivalent to $50 or $60 today for a stacked lineup and unlimited beer—but ticket prices reflected a budget that was spiraling just as quickly. Every year seemed to require more staff and security, not to mention administrative costs, overhead, and, of course, portable toilets. Entertainment rose to surpass beer as the largest expense. The kegger began with local bands donating performances, but Jimmy Buffet and Bonnie Raitt didn't work for free. In 1976, Buffet—just as his star was rising—earned $4,000, worth about $22,000 today
The Aber Day Kegger was, in spirit and practice, still a charity fundraiser. But with more partners taking their cut off the top, there wasn't as much left. In 1976, Liquid Assets had netted over $11,000 dollars to the library, with another $3,600 going to other charities. In 1977, it split $5,000 between all the causes. Results dwindled from there.
In the 2009 documentary, Bob McCue and legal advisor Bruce Barrett expressed beliefs that "adults" took advantage of the event. In Barrett's words, some Missoula businesses and organizations—–including the local government—came to view the kegger as "a big bucket of money that everybody could get a piece of." He also suggested that calls for more sanitation and security served as smokescreens to "conservatize" the kegger, reigning in its permissive spirit and reckless behavior, both real and perceived. All these simmering forces—ballooning costs, the juggernaut of college-age beer marketing, and the churning ire of disapproving residents—bubbled up at once during the planning stages of the 1979 event. The party was about to end.
By 1979, the original students behind MLAC—renamed from ULAC in 1978—had mostly graduated and moved on. Now Bob McCue, who sneaked into his first kegger in 1974, was the board's new chairman. In February, the board decided for the first time not to order beer from Earl Sherron and Olympia. They went with Coors, which had not only offered the lowest bid of MLAC's many suitors but also promised several perks, notably a film crew to record the kegger for posterity and promotion.
It's safe to say Coors wanted this contract badly. It began the 1970s as a highly coveted brand available in only about a dozen western states. Called a "precious elixir," "Colorado Kool Aid," and occasionally just "pure Rocky Mountain Spring Water," Coors beer was particularly light and crisp at a time when those flavors were gaining traction among American drinkers. But 1975 saw the launch of Miller Lite, the first nationally successful Light Beer. Other competitors soon followed, dulling some of Coors' edge. With the pressure on, Coors began expanding to a few new states in late 1976, including Montana. Coors paired its expansion with aggressive advertising in radio and print media. Among its targets was the University of Montana.
Coors also faced significant boycott campaigns centered in Colorado and California. Labor unions teamed up with activists from marginalized communities with increasing coordination and effectiveness. They vexed Coors throughout the 1970s, especially in 1977 when the workers at Coors' primary Golden, Colorado, plant went on strike. When the boycott campaign went national with the help of the AFL-CIO, sales took a hit, even in new territories like Montana.
Coors struck back in 1978, debuting Coors Light and managing to crush the Golden strike late in the year. Its Missoula distributor approached MLAC, offering to sponsor the kegger, barely two months later. While no silver bullet, the kegger must have looked like an opportunity to woo college drinkers, combat falling Montana sales, and gather hours of useful footage for advertisements that helped drinkers forget about pesky strikes and boycotts.
MLAC was generally aware of the boycott, but board members were confident they could partner with Coors without getting involved in what McCue called "political matters." They were mistaken. Not only had the boycotters survived the end of the Golden strike, they were looking to colleges as a new focus in their campaign. Beyond that, the boycott's leadership had ties to Missoula.
As soon as word got out that MLAC had chosen Coors, the Missoula Trades and Labor Council threatened to picket the kegger. One of its members was a professor at UM, who began encouraging students to join the picket and organize an alternative concert on campus. Other student groups allied with them, seeing an opportunity to sponge away the association between the kegger and Aber Day itself, which had struggled in the shadow of the kegger more every year. McCue, with the board's backing, refused to switch brands, insisting that MLAC wasn't taking a political stance. But Coors wasn't their only concern at the moment.
MLAC also needed to secure a health permit for the kegger. This was normally a routine matter. This time, however, Barbara Evans, county commissioner and member of the health board, threw a wrench into the works, declaring at a monthly meeting that the county should deny the permit and that it was time to "take a stand" against the kegger and the public safety risks it posed, particularly drunk driving.
"If the kegger is held, we will be turning hundreds, thousands, of drunk drivers out on the streets," Evans stated at the meeting. "Those kids go there specifically to get drunk." She also cited other issues such as sanitation, the potential for riot, and claims of public sex at and around the kegger.
“If the kegger is held, we will be turning hundreds, thousands, of drunk drivers out on the streets … Those kids go there specifically to get drunk.”
McCue, refuted these concerns publicly and at health board meetings, citing the kegger's strong safety record and MLAC's numerous efforts, past and present, to mitigate the kegger's problems. He even brought members of the Missoula sheriff's department—whom MLAC had hired as security in the past—to speak to the kegger's safety. Their testimony also confirmed, however, that law enforcement had deliberately chosen not to enforce drunk driving laws during past keggers. Even with parking fees, the kegger unleashed literally thousands of intoxicated drivers onto Missoula roads each year. Evans warned, "The law of averages is going to catch up with us and somebody … will get killed."
Evans drew public criticism as a moralizing prude and wet blanket, but she was also the tip of a long spear. Years of multi-vectored animosity from across Missoula came to a head. Jim Ramsey, representing the Missoula Ministerial Association, claimed that many hesitated to speak publicly against the kegger, saying "anyone touching this issue feels a little sense of apprehension because there's a lot of money to be made with this effort." Though likely a minority, opponents of the kegger turned routine bureaucracy into a weeks-long public debate. MLAC ultimately got its permit, but with conditions including hiring 20 more off-duty sheriffs than planned—a 40% increase. McCue even went even further, promising additional sanitation and shuttle buses for attendees who didn't wish to drive. Though MLAC emerged with a win, the permit controversy revealed that the organization’s local goodwill, once a sure thing, was now stretched as thin as its budget.
Somewhere in this maelstrom, McCue met with UM president Bowers. The permissive political moment that had lowered drinking-age laws and imagined new possibilities had contracted into worry and greed. The kegger was now defined less by what it could accomplish and more by who received what cut, and which complaints needed to be mollified.
Missoula's swell of resistance mirrored larger shifts taking place in American drinking culture. Consumption among American youth—dubbed the "Kegger Generation" by the Des Moines Register in Iowa—continued to rise in Montana and nationally through the 1970s. It became a tradition at a Billings, Montana, high school for the graduating class to throw a two- or three-day kegger each spring. Public fear of normalized adolescent alcoholism included a range of tragedies both real and imagined, but the effect was clear.
In 1978, Montana reverted its drinking age from 18 to 19 to combat the perceived epidemic. It wasn’t alone. Several states that had also lowered their drinking ages to 18, from Maine to Iowa, raised them in some way by the late seventies. Sharp increases in drunk driving arrests in fatalities during the 1970s and early 1980s would give rise to massive campaigns to raise the drinking age to 21 nationally. They succeeded in 1984. Every state eventually complied, including Montana in 1987.
Big breweries weren't let off the hook either. After years of running wild on college campuses, regulators, college administrators, parents, and anti-alcohol groups pushed back hard. Beer advertising was restricted or else banned at sports events. Promotional marketing on campuses came under heavy scrutiny. College marketing continued but its most egregious practices quietly faded, replaced with calculated support for National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week and ID checks at college bars.
In many ways this was a great thing—drunk driving is dangerous and cannot be trivialized. Unchecked marketing often becomes predatory. But this was not a society where serving beer by the half gallon while cops turned a blind eye to intoxicated drivers could thrive. It's no surprise that McCue and the rest of MLAC saw that their obstacles were likely to increase, not diminish. The only option left, it seemed, was to go out with a bang. And the last kegger did … sort of.
It's difficult to say whether the 1979 kegger was a success. It’s safe to assume that the roughly 8,000 people who went had a good time, but attendance fell way below estimates. Some 800 kegs rolled into those corrals full and came out empty. The beer wasn't Coors, however—MLAC gave in to boycotters about a week before the kegger and switched to union-made Rainier. The change was so last minute that a song written especially for the 1979 kegger by the Mission Mountain Wood Band still mentioned Coors in its lyrics.
By all accounts, Barbara Evans' predictions of doom never came to pass. Parking fees encouraged more attendees than ever to carpool, and many more availed themselves of the shuttles. Fewer people cut through yards. Fewer arrests. Fewer injuries. Fewer complaints. But also less money. All told, the '79 kegger left little to nothing for the UM Library or any other charities, and may have ended up in the red. That struggle to fulfill its original purpose was the Aber Day Kegger's final, bittersweet note.
Later that year, MLAC officially announced it would plan no more keggers, citing "bad PR." President Bowers said he was "relieved." Evans gloated that they'd never have gotten another health permit, anyway. Over the next few years, the University of Montana slowly decoupled Aber Day from the kegger's memory and continued the tradition until the late 1990s, when it was subsumed into broader celebrations of Earth Day.
In the moment, it probably felt as though the kegger had been dismantled by a constellation of boycotters, busybodies, and opportunists. That explanation, however, isn't enough. If it had just been a matter of politicking and PR, some intrepid students might have engineered the kegger's return. But no one did. The kegger's historical moment had simply passed. The current that swept it into being had not only stopped but reversed.
MLAC, as a corporate entity, still exists. In 2017 it even put on a self-described reunion concert to benefit local charities. While the event served causes and nostalgia, it lacked the youthful momentum of its namesake and, of course, tickets didn't include unlimited beer. It wasn't even held in Missoula.
To get the real Aber Day Kegger experience, you had to be there.
Words by Brian AlbertsIllustrations by Colette Holston
