Belgium, Germany, Netherlands and Japan! These are some of the top countries for quality beer production. Despite it being the most popular alcoholic beverage here, Australia didn’t even make the top 13! To help shine a bright light on some of our best native brews, the organisers for Adelaide’s Beer and BBQ Fest ordered an inflatable novelty beer can for their 2018 three day event.
Any occasion to bring people together for a common goal, even if they’ll be well inebriated, is a thrill for us. We couldn’t wait to work with this client again!
Gathering the Ingredients
In 2017, Inflatable Anything was tasked with creating bespoke inflatables for that year’s iteration of this festival—beer kegs. The units were such a big hit that they came back to us for an inflatable novelty beer can to act as a sign for their feature pop up pub. Obviously, the unit wasn’t exactly to be a large product replica because it wasn’t modelled after a type of beer, but the organisers knew we had quite a bit of experience from past projects. They commissioned a 2.5 metre standard can, with a properly proportioned width, complete with original artwork for the label.
Activating the Yeast
Supplying their own sketch saved our team here at Inflatable Anything some time, so all we had to do was draw up a sketch for the client’s approval. When it came to actually applying the original artwork to the inflatable novelty beer can, we fed both the client’s drawing and the material into a digital printer, blew up the image to an appropriate size, and let the machine do its magic.
Not only is this the easier and more precise way to transfer artwork, but this kind of printer generally results in a higher quality image. On top of that, we used a full surface (all-at-once) print with CMYK colours, which can achieve nearly the entire spectrum with its four colour matching technique.
At Inflatable Anything, we really want to make sure we provide our clients with the best solutions possible!
Brewing up the Batch
The 2 materials that are without a doubt best suited for inflatables are the 2 options we offer- polyester and polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. Both have most of the same general qualities to them, but depending on the client’s purposes for the unit and the functionality it needs to have, usually 1 option stands very clearly above the other. For this themed inflatable novelty beer can, our ultimate winner by just 1 point was the former polymer.
Polyester, also known as polyethylene terephthalate, is a plastic-like material whose fibres have very little space in between them, making for quite a strong option. The feature that really pushed polyester above polyvinyl chloride in our mind for this project, though, is that the former is indeed quite strong, but still mouldable: it can hold unique shapes—like the rim of a can—very well without puckering or wrinkling.
However, for an inflatable novelty beer can meant to be propped up on and tied down to the roof of a tavern, there were 2 qualities that were more or less most important. Since this festival was traditionally held outdoors with buildings scattered throughout its perimeter, polyester’s ability to resist many of the shots Mother Nature might throw its way, like rain and extreme sunshine, fit the bill perfectly.
Secondly, the inflatable novelty beer can was likely to be reused for the pop up sampling Australia’s best brews for years to come, so it needed to be portable as well as lightweight enough not to put too much stress on the roof of the Beer and BBQ festival's makeshift pub. For this reason, and to decrease unpleasant distraction from this lively event, we also constructed the unit with internal blowers.
Cheers, Mate!
Overall, the process from conceptualising the inflatable novelty beer can, to quality control and delivery passed by pretty quickly. It really helped that not only did the client know exactly what they wanted, but also knew that once they finished everything on their end, they could fully place their trust in us to manufacture the very best unit we could using high quality materials for them.
The next time you need to add a dash of lime to your event, contact our team of professionals!
