Like any legend, the birth of the beer snake is the subject of debate. An ESPN article about the phenomenon traced the first cup snake to a place that has always been representative of humanity—the Wrigley Field bleachers. A Cubs fan named Lauren Mroz uncovered a picture of her father, Mike, working on a beer snake at Wrigley in 1969, a photo which ran in the Chicago Sun-Times.
“I think it was spontaneous, and a one-time event,” said Mike Mroz during an interview about the episode on WGN Radio. “My brother and I ran around the ballpark getting as many cups as we could and we brought ‘em to the group.”
“I don’t think it happened before,” Mroz said, speaking to the relative influence of he and his brother’s actions that day. “And I don’t think it happened after.”
Many outlets trace the modern success of the phenomenon to the world of international cricket, which currently claims the mantle of longest beer snake ever, a 328-foot monster that bored fans built during a rained-out Sri Lanka vs Australia cricket match in 2013.
Compared to American sport, cricket has a demonstrative beer snake advantage—test cricket matches can last for days, and even the shortened Twenty20 matches last three or four hours. That’s a lot of cup-collecting time, compared to the alcohol service windows in the NFL or other American sports leagues.
In America, the cup snake’s path has been a twisting one.
You can’t talk about American cup snake without mentioning the Plymouth, MN based media company 10,000 Takes. They’d buy group event seats at Minnesota Twins games and distribute them among like-minded supporters, all of whom knew what they were signing up for. While these early adventures were frowned upon by the Twins and their security staff, 10,000 Takes kept going, earning renown for their gameday beer snakes.
After a few official collaborations with regional minor league teams, the 10,000 Takes crew was eventually called up to the majors when the Minnesota Wild officially collaborated with them on a beer snake, a 247-foot stack that, for a moment, represented the North American record and landed the group on all the ESPN morning shows.
“We’re a smaller market out here,” says 10,000 Takes co-founder Jack Leverentz. “We thought, I bet we could get the Wild or the Twins on ESPN if we build a massive beer snake. Let’s make beer snakes a Minnesota thing. We promised ourselves that, when COVID was over, we’d do one.”
Leverentz is a beer snake purist. There are certain rules a beer snake must follow. To be a legit beer snake, it has to have enough cups to be able to bend—at least a few dozen. And also, you can’t come about the empty cups fraudulently—you have to drink them until they’re completely empty before adding them to the snake. Fallen soldiers, or drinks that have been abandoned midway, are the bane of the beer snake.
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