Shock Top taps water-saving bricks to combat drought
Shock Top Brewing Co. has a new twist on the old water-saving trick of putting a brick in your toilet.
The Anheuser Busch-owned brewery has donated $100,000 to Drop-A-Brick 2.0, which makes rubber bricks that you can put in your toilet tank to save water on each flush. The bricks will be distributed through groups helping combat the California drought.
It's the first of a year-long campaign of conservation support for Shock Top, which has breweries in Los Angeles and Fairfield, Calif., near San Francisco. Each month, Shock Top will help fun a new water-saving project on crowdfunding site Indiegogo, where Drop-A-Brick also got its start.
"We really thought about relevant ways we could engage the consumer and make an impact on an issue that is close to all of us," said Shock Top vice president Jake Kirsch. "We started to think about the drought (and) ... solutions that at either very low or no cost can be out in the market that at scale can really make a difference."
Many of the 300,000-plus campaigns on Indiegogo involve some social impact, said Jerry Needel, the site's senior vice president of sales and market development. "Shock Top is pioneering a really great model on how to do this in a way that really benefits the community of change makers and entrepreneurs that exist on Indiegogo," he said.
Without Shock Top's funding, Drop-A-Brick 2.0 might have been shuttered, says co-founder Ian Montgomery, who remembered his family putting actual bricks in their toilets at his family home in Australia. The project fell short of its goal last fall, but the founders went ahead and began making the rubber bricks by hand.
Recently, they began to worry about having to close down, but they got the call from Shock Top. "I think we would have died if not for the investment," Montgomery said. Now, they can buy molds to make bricks faster and get them to the public.
You can order your own bricks and donate them on the ProjectDropABrick website and on Indiegogo.
Initially, Montgomery wondered what the catch was. But after touring the Anheuser Busch plant he was impressed by the brewery's water conservation and recycling efforts. "OK, sure they get the benefit of promotion, but they have a genuine desire to help the community of California," Montgomery said. "And for us, it's an amazing opportunity. We're not likely to get this from private investors. I wish more companies cared like they do because it’s a problem that effects us all."
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