Product Review: Beer Cap Maps
Story by:
Chris Guest
With craft beer and brewing an immensely popular pastime, tons of merchandise and breweriana has become available. From men’s ties that can hold a beer bottle to openers that are shaped like any number of unusual things, craft beer accessories is a booming business.
Sure, huge craft beer sales numbers means better beer is performing well in the market, but it also means that there’s a lot of used bottles, cans and other vessels that are tossed away (hopefully into the recycling bin). Going even more micro, every craft beer fan has an almost limitless supply of bottle caps – something that Beer Cap Maps certainly understands.
Beer Cap Maps (as the name would suggest) specializes in finely-crafted and beautifully-appointed maps with slots available for any beer caps in good condition – not bent up or misshapen – from your favorite breweries. The maps are available in wood, corrugated steel or whitewashed laminate. All look good and each variant would fit in many beercentric decorating schemes.
Our sample was a wooden map of the contiguous United States, but if you want to local, all 50 states are available with roughly the same capacity (still less than the full US one). Also, if you wanted to go global, maps of select countries are also available, spanning the globe from Brazil to New Zealand – with major beer markets like Belgium and Germany also represented, among others.
Attaching the caps couldn’t be easier, as the 3-foot wide map of the United State only took a short while to complete. Of course, the idea is to slowly fill up the map as you drink new and exciting beers, but since we’re a beer publication, we were knee deep in caps already. One caveat: while bent and besmirched caps can fit, they don’t quite have the visual “pop” that pristine ones do, so try and keep them in good condition.
Brighter, light-colored caps tend to show up better on the wooden map, as I tried to spell out “USA” in Yuengling caps, and it backfired – those caps are practically the same shade as the background wood, making it invisible.
Also provided to us were Beer Cap Maps’ bottle opener coaster sets. These solidly-built wooden coasters feature one hole for a bottle cap and are emblazoned with phrases like “Beer Snob,” “Drink Local,” and “I’m Full of Craft” (my personal favorite). On the bottom of the coaster, a bottle opener is embedded, meaning this coaster pulls double duty. Beer Cap Maps, you think of everything!
Displaying your completed or in-progress Beer Cap Map can be accomplished via the small nail holes in the map or by using the standoff wall hanger, which creates a striking shadow effect, as if the map is levitating against the wall, kept aloft simply by the magnitude of its craft beer beatitude.
The good people at Beer Cap Maps certainly love beer, and they want to make it easy for everyone to convey their love of beer in a simple, elegant and customizable work of art.
Check out all of their products HERE.
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