Typical NY Times elitism. They have no problem with underage Hollywood socialites bar-hopping and going out to the nightclubs.
Did you notice the Margaret Mead anthropology tone of the article, especially the part where they said that the beer drinking can’t be the result of German culture because German isn’t widely spoken in Wisconsin anymore? Yeah, I guess my wife’s whole family must secretly speak German, because they have German family traditions and all of them appear to only speak English.