St. Patrick’s Day was smelling particularly good around here a few days ago – SEDA’s 2013 St. Paddy’s Day mailer featured close to 200 bags of freshly roasted and ground coffee from local craft roaster PERC Coffee.
What better Post-Celebratory pick up could there be than a hand-roasted brew fresh from the hostess city? Exactly – that’s what we thought. And this year’s little extra something something was that the coffee would be mailed in a pop top can. Nice.
So, some background. Every year SEDA sends a St Patrick’s gift out to clients and prospects. Savannah hosts the second biggest celebration of this March happening, you know. And every year, we find a locally made product to feature. This year we worked with local coffee brewer Perc and they were great! So knowledgable. So delicious (the coffee). Did you know freshly roasted coffee releases carbon dioxide? No. Neither did we, but Roast Master Philip Brown did, and it was good to know, because if we’d canned them too soon we would have had exploding coffee cans. Which would surely have displeased the postal service.
The can label promoted Savannah while the coffee bag label was specific to SEDA and the programs and resources they offer.
Text you’d traditionally find on coffee cans was reworked – wait – I’ll show you:
And now the bags:
Never one to shy away from a challenge, we bought ourselves a canner (and a lot of cans in order to fully master our craft). The model that arrived was surely the very one used by canning enthusiasts at the turn of the century, and I mean 20th, people. And we have the instructions to prove it.
We’re seriously considering whether or not a future project should involve translating the instructions into something a lay person could understand. You know, sort of like a service to the community.
Coffee. Mailed in a Can. Yeah!
Once this antique torture device (Truth! It has thumb screws. Two. I’ll wait. Go read the instructions again, part # 13169) was assembled (no mean feat alone and we know about working in 3-D) we spent an unfortunate amount of time mangling can after can. It was grim. Then a mechanically-minded staffer (and heck no, I ain’t naming no names…ok, it was Phil) came to the rescue of those containers manufactured from earth’s third most abundant element (so it’s OK, plus we recycled the casualties anyway).
Canning debacle aside the final outcome was exactly as we envisioned! And more importantly SEDA was thrilled as were the lucky recipients.
Can’t wait to see what happens next year, and in the mean time, if you need any canning done, you know who’s got you covered. Call our amazing SCAD student helper Nikki (thank you Nikki! So much!!) She did a bang-up job.
Oh! And happy St Paddy’s!
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