Beerdelier!

What is a beerdelier you ask?  Read on and find out.

bar at Manito Tap House

Here is the latest project for the cabin.  I got the idea to do some sort of 22oz beer bottle light fixture at the Manito Tap House in Spokane (check out their blackened mac and cheese if you are ever there, oh and the 50 beers on tap too). Here is a pic of their bar from their website, see the lights?


Essentially they are 22 oz beer bottles with painted labels (paper ones wouldn't work so well) that have had the bottom cut out and a light socket put inside and hung from a pendant light cord.. Like most things I see, I figured "I can do that"... so I did.

I set about gathering ideas on how to put it together and ways to wire it, and of course had to go about acquiring materials... which consisted of drinking many bottles of beer to find not just bottles with cool looking painted labels, but also the beer had to be good as well.  Fortunately one of my favorite breweries, Stone Brewing, uses painted labels, and they are really cool featuring gargoyles and funny verbiage.  I found that I only have about a 50% success rate in getting a clean cut off the bottom of the bottle, so that entailed drinking even more bottles.. darn.  Whilst looking for ideas I ran across a picture of a great huge chandelier made out of black pipe (usually used for gas plumbing) that I thought was really cool and something I could easily do and obtain (the pipe, not the chandelier it was like $1600).  So I did more searches for light fixtures made from black pipe and there are tons of them (I love the internet ;).  Using a few as inspiration I bought a bunch of pipe and fittings, played around with arrangements and assembled and wired the whole thing up.  I bought some cool cloth covered cord online (http://www.colorcord.com/) that came in 44 colors.. so of course I bought black.

So without further ado, here is my new dining area light fixture:

beerdelier

with table

Close view

even closer view

Some may be wondering what bottles I ended up with.  The center bottle is one of my top 3 favorite beers, Arrogant Bastard Ale from Stone Brewing.  I could have easily had all Stone Brewing bottles, all their beers are good, but I decided to have a little variety.. but only a little.  The others are Stone IPA, Stone Imperial Russian Stout, Hopworks Urban Brewery Survival "7-Grain" Stout, and Rouge Dead Guy Ale.   I may at some point swap out some of the bottles if I can ever get a Stone Sublimely Self-Righteous Black IPA bottle to not shatter when cutting the bottom off.. same with a Stone Ruination IPA, both great beers and really cool bottles.  What are my other 2 top 3 favorite beers?  Both from Deschutes Brewing, Cinder Cone Red, and Hop in the Dark.  Of course I haven't tried ALL the beers, and there are many more I enjoy, so the lists are subject to change.