Managing the Tower (Part 1)

This post will be the first of many behind-the-scenes peeks at what goes into managing our beer can tower project. In part it will be a way of conveying the amount of hidden effort involved, but it should also serve as a pretty thorough guide should anyone reading want to create a tower of their own! And so here's the first (and potentially most enjoyable) part of the process - consumption!

Part 1: Consumption

You can't build a beer can tower without first drinking vast quantities of beer! This can be achieved a little at a time, or with the occasional mass-contribution through a night of drinking games (we recommend Beer Pong!). However you do it, you'll soon start stocking up empty cans.

Surprisingly that's not the end of the consumption step, though. All of these cans must then be de-ringpulled and, ideally, rinsed out. This can be pretty time-consuming, especially when 20 or more cans build up by the sink! 

Once washed and de-ringpulled, you'll need to find a way to store the cans in between towers. As the number of cans grows, so too must the number of boxes. Between our second and third year we found ourselves filling 10 IKEA boxes (see this post).

Finally, it's useful to have a system in place for logging how many cans have been consumed. For this we use a spreadsheet, which not only allows you to keep track of the number of cans but also other statistics such as total ml/units consumed and who they were consumed by!

With this final piece in place it becomes possible to tell exactly when there are enough cans to build the next size of pyramid, which leads to the next stage - construction!