Bru-wing in July!

If you had foretold a year ago that we’d be brewing our very own Twisted Toast beer in 2012 I would have thought you were smoking something. I mean, I’m really more of a champagne girl myself. But we get to do some crazy stuff at The Toast.

It all started with a referral from a client (read Twisted Toast fan) to reputation management consultancy Corporate Image who had been tasked by its client, SABMiller Group Technical, to handle the development of an animation video to illustrate the global company’s brewing process.

To enable the agency to deliver a 2D isometric motion graphics solution that explains a technically complex process correctly, simply and without fuss we busied ourselves in everything relating to the brewing of the perfect pint and joked that perhaps when the project was finally completed, we should perhaps try our hand at making beer.

Once the idea was formed, there really was no turning back. We held a quarterly agency strat session on Friday 13th of July and it was decided there and then that we’d brew our own beer in time for a Spring celebration, where we can unveil our brew to clients at a tasting! All going well we should have three different brews ready for the tasting.

Erik Verster was unanimously voted in as master brewer. Erik has also designed the logo for Toast Homebru, Breakfast of Champions.

As an agency “skills development workshop” we also intend selling Toast at a still to be determined Micro-brewing festival, to sharpen up on all our selling skills. If popular, we may consider selling our beer on a digital storefront.

Word has spread throughout the building and we now have people popping in every day to check out what’s bru-wing in our pantry, which makes for excellent brand content to feed Facebook. Socially this experiment is a sure winner! The beer should make a great alternative corporate gift and the esteemed MD of Starcom, Gordon Patterson has suggested we commemorate important agency milestones with a special batch of beer.

The brewing process motion graphics video created and produced by Twisted Toast is being used by many of SABMiller’s operations across the globe, including Peru, Colombia, India, Australia, Poland, the Czech republic and Tanzania.

We’ll drink to that in-between pitches, after listening to the radio ad we did for Accountable Media, flipping through a magazine checking the placement of the new product print ad for GFP Machines, checking our clients regular newsletters and presentations and monitoring a myriad of Facebook campaigns – not to mention dealing with the printers.

Cheers and bring on Spring!