Teachers and students now bond over beers at Rollins College
The new Dave’s Boathouse offers a selection of local beers and wine to go with its menu.
December 31, 2015
Gloria Dawson
Back in the 1970s and ’80s Rollins College students, and even their professors, enjoyed a pint at the Tar Pit in the student center. But when the state of Florida pushed the legal drinking age to 21, the college shut down the beer-serving space. As of November, the school is once again serving beer, as well as wine and food, at a new pub called Dave’s Boathouse, thanks, in part, to some persistent students.
“Everything started with the students’ interest three years ago,” says Hernan Gustavo Vasconez, the general manager of Sodexo Campus Services at Rollins College. “They wanted to have a beer- and wine-option on campus.”
The student government proposed a community space that happened to serve alcohol, not a bar for hard drinking, they stressed. Vasconez and his team began to look into the feasibility of a pub on campus. The school already had six other dining options, including a traditional cafeteria and three cafés. (Rollins College has been rated one of the best colleges in America for food by the culinary website The Daily Meal.)
Vasconez and his team first did a thorough analysis of the campus. They found that when the school year started about 34 percent of students were over 21, but by January that number jumped to 43 percent. That number didn’t include teachers, faculty and staff or members of the community. The outside community in Winter Park, Fla., where Rollins is based, has been dining at the campus’s food establishments for years “especially brunch time on Sundays is very popular,” Vasconez says.
Vasconez and his team then worked on a liquor license for the Boathouse. They already had a subsidiary liquor license for catering events on campus, so getting a permanent license was not difficult, he says.