Thursday, October 2, 2008

Green Packaging for Organic Competition Beer

Tomorrow we will mail off our first beer that we're entering into a competition. Proudly, it is also our first all-organic homebrew. We blogged about it before, it is our Organic Rainy Day Pale Ale, and we're entering it into the National Organic Homebrew Challenge, located in Santa Cruz, CA. (Yikes ... carbon footprint it takes to get the beer there ... need to do something to offset that!)
But, we CAN proudly say that our packaging of the beer was fairly green. The entry form and labels were printed on 100% recycled paper, the rubberbands were (I think) leftovers from tie-dye projects, and then there was what we used for cushioning.


Per a suggestion from Bryan S., our current SCBG president, we decided to use a poster-tube and stack the beers for sending. First, we needed to cushion the bottom. We decided to take advantage of some of the kids stained clothes (that we were going to use for rags). A pair of shorts was stuffed in the bottom first. Then, we had to wrap the beers. We cut the shirts in 1/2 and, as you can see in the photo above, wrapped the beers.

And then we stuffed it down into the tube! We also stuffed a shirt in between bottles for extra cushioning. Needless to say, this entire process had us laughing our asses off!! Once we got all three bottles in, we capped it all off with another 1/2 of an old kid t-shirt for padding. We wondered if we should've included a note "Beer is INSIDE clothing" --- should that be included in the tube or written under where we wrote "FRAGILE" on the outside of the tube?
Though we hope the recipients of our tube find humor in the packaging, we do take delight in the fact that not only is the beer green (obviously though not literally in color!), but so is the packaging: recycled, soft, cut up clothing!!


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