Out-of-the-box thinking results in creative Beer Advent Calendar opportunity

Once again, the holiday season is approaching, and it’s as challenging as ever to think of new and interesting gift ideas for the beer lover in your life.

Perhaps, as we’ve done in the past, you’ve hand-picked a set of interesting-looking cans or bombers and stuffed them into stockings or tucked them into an array of gift bags. That’s a great way to curate what’s going under the tree.

Alternatively, you might have bought a mix pack from a single BC brewery. Better yet, if you were lucky enough to find one, you indulged in a beer advent calendar from one of the few local breweries that have offered such a thing.

Advent calendars are great because they contain 24 beers which the recipient gets to open on a daily basis if they want to. They’re just as fun as the pre-Christmas candy packs that inspired them. But when it comes to what’s inside the box, you’re at the mercy of the brewery. If only there was a way to have such an advent calendar, but ensure that the beers included were all worth gifting.

Allow us to present the ultimate present: the Craftmas Box, BC’s newest holiday beer gift tradition.

Where’s The Beer?

Craftmas Box is a new BC company which is offering a beer advent calendar kit. There are three “flavours” as seen above, sold online for $24.99 each.

Echoing a Wendy’s ad campaign from decades past, you might ask: “Where’s The Beer?” The answer is: you’re supplying that yourself. Which prompts the natural followup question, why buy an empty box? It turns out that, for many beer geeks, the answer is only too clear.

With other beer advent calendars, which of course retail for a lot more money, you have no particular creative input. You can only hope that your loved one will enjoy the beers provided. Generally, that wouldn’t be a problem if the beers provided were of a comparable quality to what the source brewery typically produces.

However, if you’ve ever gifted or received a commercial beer advent calendar, you may have found that the supplied beverages didn’t all meet your expectations. The obvious reason for this is that there are two dozen of them, and the brewery can’t just provide all of the same standard brews they’d include in a mixer pack during the rest of they year. So they come up with some ‘creative’ holiday recipes, and not all of them might tickle your fancy, especially if you have a discriminating palate.

So, if you’ve ever had advent calendar buyer’s remorse, or if you happen to know what types of beers your intended recipient prefers, or if you’re just a creative, out-of-the-box thinker, the Craftmas Box might be the route for you.

Instructions are provided, but you won’t need them!

Unboxing the Box

First impression is that the artwork on the boxes is impressive. They’re quick to assemble as well, as seen in our unboxing and re-boxing video above.

The 24 spaces in the box are designed to hold regular 12oz beer bottles. That means they’re really not meant for 650ml bombers, so remember that when you’re out shopping.

As you’ll know, a lot of beer comes in cans these days. Cans come in different sizes. Fortunately, there are 11 cardboard spacers included which will help your cans match the height of your bottles. The only mildly tricky thing to learn is that the spacers which are labelled ‘Tall’ are the size you use for small cans, and ‘Regular’  is for tall cans.

Revealing your personal creativity: it’s not just for beer

Once you start to think out of the box, the ‘hopportunities’ are endless. Naturally the box is not limited to beer, since you can include cider, mini hard liquor bottles, craft sodas or any bottle that fits. However, it doesn’t stop there. Who says a calendar can only contain beverages?

Well, we don’t, and the Craftmas folks agree. They have a starter list of items you can place in the box, including gift cards, coffee beans, specialty tea bags, soaps, lotions, snacks, candy, cigars, toys, or anything.

Since Beer Me BC and its cousin What’s Brewing are avid collectors of BC beer items, it’s only appropriate that we should suggest a few gems to help your Craftmas Box sparkle under the Christmas tree. Basically, almost anything that would fit in a Christmas stocking can fit in the Craftmas Box. So how about:

• • Beer glasses (these fit perfectly, and they’re well protected)
  • Beer Festival Tickets
  • Beer Festival T-shirt (rolled up)
  • Brewery T-shirt
  • Brewery Touque
  • Beer collectibles and breweriana
  • Cellarable beer bottles (for consumption during a future holiday season)
  • What’s Brewing magazine (actually just kidding on that one; it’s no longer printed)
  • What’s Brewing Beer Caddy

Here’s what our test box looked like once loaded up with random treats. Only your imagination will hold you back:

In Conclusion

Many thanks to Craftmas Box for giving us the opportunity to check out their first-run product. In the right hands, it unlocks the gift-giver’s imagination and bestows topnotch presentation on a set of liquid, or other, gifts. Contact them for more info, or place your order at:

Craftmasbox Ltd.
7291 No.6 Road
Richmond BC V6W 1C9
ac.xobsamtfarcobfsctd@ecivresremotsuc
www.craftmasbox.ca

Online Shop → 

Image contributors: Ivana Smith, Dave Smith, Kelsey Blaby and Craftmas Box