For current Penn State students, bar tours may seem like a State College staple -- gobs of celebrating students outfitted in bright-colored T-shirts, roving from bar to bar.

However, the organized bar tours as students know them today are actually a relatively recent phenomenon, bar managers and town officials say.

Paul Spayd, manager at Café 210, 210 W. College Ave., said he didn't start seeing people in custom T-shirts, especially professionally produced ones, until about three years ago.

Michael James, general manager at Bill Pickle's Tap Room, 106 S. Allen St., said he's also seen more regular bar tours on weekends during the spring semester.

In previous years, he said, a group might visit the bar occasionally, but last year, groups started visiting every Saturday starting the second week of February. This year, the tours started happening in January, he said.

State College Mayor Bill Welch, who graduated from Penn State in 1964, said he doesn't recall taking part in a bar tour and hadn't heard of them until recent years.

"I don't remember when drinkers developed restless leg syndrome," he said.

Welch added that in the 1960s, the goal was to learn to "hold your liquor."

"The aim was not to go out and get shit-faced as fast as you can," he said.

James said some of the groups he's seen on bar tours are teams, former residence hall floor occupants and employees from other bars. Some of the biggest groups he's seen are alumni of commonwealth campuses. He once saw a bar tour from Penn State Hazleton with about 275 people.

George Khoury, the 2008-2009 Council of Commonwealth Student Governments president, said he went on a bar tour for all commonwealth campus students last year.

"They were some of the best of times," he said. "The campuses' bar tours are ones to be remembered."

However, even though organized bar tours have become more popular, James said the students have also become more well behaved.

"At one point it was just a drunken raucous party from one end of town to the other," he said. In recent years, though, the worst he's seen is the occasional graffiti.

James said the bars get progressively more crowded during finals week -- Thursday is "banging" -- but attendance starts to fall off on Friday as students go home.

Most bar tours during finals week are at night, he said, adding that the afternoon crowd is mostly small groups of friends getting together after finishing exams.

The week before graduation, though, is a whole different story.

"It just starts right off," James said.

Spayd agreed, calling it the "most crazy time."

How to make it through every bar on your list

Checking off every bar on your T-shirt is no easy task. Zach Meli (junior-economics) who's organizing a bar tour for his fraternity, Phi Kappa Theta, offered some tips on making it through the hours of drinking:

1. Drink at a constant pace. "You gotta keep that constant drunk," Meli said. "Once you lose it, you're gonna fall asleep." You also shouldn't overdo it too quickly during the early part of the bar tour, he added.

2. Don't stay at one bar too long. If you're going to make it through ever bar on your list, you need to keep moving, Meli said, adding that the optimal length of stay at each bar depends on the number of bars you're visiting on the tour.

3. Eat a good meal during the bar tour. The food will help keep you energized, Meli said.

"You wanna make sure you can get to the night," he said.

UHS distributes safety cards

Penn State University Health Services also sees more activity when bar tours are happening.

"We always see an increase when there's celebratory drinking going on," said Beth Collitt, UHS Marketing Manager.

In fact, Collitt said UHS had recently finished redesigning cards that indicate safe drinking levels by body weight and the amount of alcohol content in various drinks. For instance, Collitt said, Monkey Boy pitchers, 22 oz. margaritas and Long Island ice teas all contain four to five drinks each.

"One thing that we've found is that students think they are only drinking one drink, but what is marketed as one drink is often more than one," she said.

The cards also offer a number of other tips for people going out:

1. Eat a full meal before going out

2. Determine your limit in advance

3. Drink a glass of water after every alcoholic drink

4. Aim for one alcoholic drink per hour

5. Avoid drinking games

6. Never drink and drive

First Priority: Mike the Mailman's Tour

It started more than 20 years ago with four Penn State seniors and a mailman watching Cheers.

But on the evening of May 14, the "Cheers 1st Class Tour" will happen again, this time with more than 100 people.

The tour, organized by Mike Herr, also known as Mike the Mailman, brings together Penn State seniors, faculty and staff who signed up at the post office in the McAllister Building.

"People who would not normally mix together, they are together," Herr said.

Starting at Old Main, the group will head downtown, hitting 11 bars before finishing at Ye Olde College Diner, 126 W. College Ave., for breakfast at 1:47 a.m. Every stop on the tour is pre-scheduled on an itinerary, with each bar stop taking place at an odd-number time.

"It's all about being silly and having fun," Herr said.

In the early tours, people dressed up like Cliff Claven, the mailman on Cheers. Since then, Herr has started using T-shirts instead because he ran out of mailman uniforms. The T-shirts feature the names of characters from Cheers and slogans like "Hug a Mail Man."

Herr said this is the "39th annual" tour, but that doesn't mean it has happened 39 times: he just likes to use odd numbers in the 30s, he said.

There's also evidence that the tour is garnering national recognition: Herr said he was recognized when he visited the official Cheers bar in Boston last August.