Beer as Art aka "What to do with your collection of beer bottles"

I told myself that this year I would not put my collected beer bottles on the shelves of my room but it seemed like a waste of effort to simply throw all those gorgeous bottles in the recycle bin. I decided that a poster with all the labels on it would look a heck of a lot more classy and put those labels to good use. I started taking the labels off the bottle about a week ago and was met with a few stubborn bottles, namely the Great Lakes beers and Flying Dog Raging Bitch. 

Unfortunately those labels do not currently reside on my poster, which is a shame (particularly for Raging Bitch) because the artwork is pretty cool. What I did to take the labels off is fill a trash bin with hot water and let the bottles soak anywhere from 10 minutes to 10 hours; the water loosens the glue on the bottle and makes it pretty easy to just peel off the label. There exists a difference in time needed to soak because different companies use different glue strengths (for instance almost all euro imports were extremely easy to get off and required the least amount of soakage time).Once all the labels were off I pressed them between textbooks and let them dry before getting them prepped to go on the poster board. When they were all flat and ready to go I got some white glue and cut it a bit (3 parts glue to 1 part water) and painted the mixture onto the back of the labels with a paintbrush. 

 

After sticking all of the labels on the board I found that I had a bit of white space to fill so the project is currently on hold (as you can see in the picture) but I anticipate completion within the next 2 weeks. Just a note on gluing things to foam boards; apparently if you glue around the edges as I started out doing at first the sides of the board will curl inward. To combat this, I would first make sure the glue dries for a little while, then flip the board over onto a table and put some heavy objects on top of it to keep it straight and flat. I've had to keep it weighed down constantly in hopes that it flattens out. 

Stay tuned for more photos and feel free to post any questions about doing this yourself.