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!

Beer Can Tower : Avalanche

An 11-Storey tower flying down a flight of stairs as promised - enjoy!

Down the stairs?

We've just finished running some tests for our latest plan to send a tower tumbling down the stairs. It took a bit of arts and crafts work to set up, but with an old cardboard box, some string, sellotape and a few pencils in strategic places we're all set!

 

Sadly due to how narrow our stairs are we're only going to be able to fit an 11-storey tower down them (286 cans), but we're working on ways to improve on that if we can!

BCT17

BCT17 

(21/10/12 - 17/11/12)

Destruction : String

The Ocado Shop - Revisited

Last weekend we finally cracked open the 14th and final box from our Ocado order, which we saved from last year so we'd have some beer in the house upon our return. To celebrate we unboxed all 210 cans and took some pictures.

 

We also decided to send Ocado an e-mail to thank them for their mistake - here's what we wrote:

"We just wanted to say thanks for an enormous quantity of inexpensive beer!

Around 9 months ago my housemates and I placed an order on your website for no less than 210 cans of Carlsberg, which saw us through the latter half of our second year of university nicely. We've been stockpiling cans for our beer can tower since the first year, and it currently contains around 1000 cans (you can find pictures of it here: http://beercantower.blogspot.co.uk/). This means that your store alone has supplied about 1/5th of all that we've collected to date!

I've attached a photo of the crates the day they arrived, as well as some from the night when we finished off the 14th and final box. Thanks again!"

 

Sadly all we got back was one of those generic "thanks for the feedback" e-mails, which was very disappointing - we were hoping for something a little more imaginative than a copy+paste response. Maybe we should e-mail Carlsberg to see if they'd appreciate it...

Probably the most abundant lager in our house...

 

Milestones

Things have been fairly quiet since university started, but we did recently hit the 1000 can mark! With this we've also broken 2000 units, and are up to 51 different types of can.

There will definitely be some BCT-related antics this weekend so expect another update soon!

Third Year - The Beginning of the End

So this is it, our final year! It's a week before lectures start and I imagine there will be plenty of cans contributed in that time. We just finished going over the small number of cans we were able to bring up from our summers, and now it's time to get drinking towards 20 storeys!