PARTY ORANGE: 27th ANNUAL ORANGE INTERNATIONAL STREET FAIR : Fair’s Extensive Beer Menu Speaks Universal Language

During the first street fair in Orange, you drank lemonade to quench your thirst.

It was 1910, and by local ordinance, Orange was dry. No liquor stores. No bars. Only a few bootleggers and a winery just beyond the city limits.

What a difference 89 years make.

Those attending this year’s Orange International Street Fair will find beer in profusion--14 brands from nine countries.

Besides domestic beer from Coors--one of the fair’s sponsors--there will be Asahi from Japan; Almaza from Lebanon; Carlsberg from Denmark; Carta Blanca, Corona, Pacifico and Tecate from Mexico; Bass, Guinness and Harp from Ireland; Heineken from Holland; Lowenbrau from Germany . . .

And most remarkable of all, there will be Frydenlund from Norway, the only one of the brands you can’t otherwise find in Southern California.

For this thank Don Lilja and his buddies at the Sons of Norway in Placentia.

Each year to get the beer to their booth by September they call the brewery in May. This year the order was for 336 cases. (That’s 8,064 bottles.)

The beer is shipped through the Panama Canal to San Francisco. From there it is trucked by a beer distributor to Southern California, where the Sons of Norway pick it up in a rented truck. Total cost: around $8,000, Lilja said.

“It’s a long trip and a lot of effort, but people really like the beer,” he said.

Besides beer, one booth also sells wine, but you won’t get either without a special bracelet attesting to your legal drinking age.

A bracelet is good only for the day it’s issued and costs $1, which goes to charity. To further guard against underage drinking, there are uniformed police about, and the beer cups are marked to show which booth sold the beer.

“We sell a lot of beer, but we have very few arrests,” said C.J. Vulcan, chairman of the fair’s food and drink. “With that many people and that much alcohol, it’s amazing how well-behaved the crowd is.”

“I think there were four or five arrests last year, and those were only for drunk and disorderly,” said John Loertscher, City Hall’s liaison with the fair committee.

Police tend to quickly hustle away the rowdy ones. “They put them in the [police] trailer, let them sober up a little and tell them to go home,” Loertscher said. “We’ve never had any major incidents.”

Nonetheless, the number of booths selling beer is declining, and that’s the way the fair committee wants it, said president Judy Sollee. “We used to have 26. Now we have 15. Our policy is that if a group selling beer drops out, we don’t replace them.”

Beer and wine sales end at 9 each night, an hour before the fair closes, “but then the young ones are just getting started,” Sollee said. Some visitors wind up at the bars and restaurants inside the fair and on its outskirts.

Sollee said that on the fair’s closing night last year one reveler went into a bar with the fair in full swing. As is the fair’s policy, all the fair paraphernalia was packed up and moved away by 1 a.m.

When the reveler came out at closing time, there was no trace that a fair had ever been there, she said. “It just blew him away. He probably decided to quit drinking.”