The Czechs are phenomenal beer drinkers. It is a tradition dating back to early 19th century when the first "pilsner" beer was brewed in the Czech town of Pilsen. The main ingredient in beer making is hops, a creeper plant grown on hanging wires. Hops has a short harvest window, and that created a labor problem for the Communists to find enough manpower to harvest all of the hops grown in the country within three weeks at the end of the summer. So they recruited high school students as a source of cheap and plentiful labor. Entire schools were bused to small villages, housed in gender segregated dormitories and made to pick hops for eight hours every day. We were paid a small amount that usually took months to arrive.
But the hops picking weeks were a welcome transition between vacation and school and there was a fair amount of socializing between the sexes despite the rumor that our morning tea was liberally laced with bromide.