Advent Calendar 2025 - Day 7

One week down — 17 days left until Christmas!!!

Today's beer is a new one we've recently released... and it comes with a few hints:

• Its name was inspired by a song from a movie. The movie referenced is A Space Odyssey, and the songwriter behind the piece was from Vienna.

• The style of the beer is a Vienna-style beer.

• The label for this beer was created using a tool that’s currently a very hot topic. If you've seen our Instagram, you'll know why.

• The tool used to make the label was also a major theme in the movie that inspired the beer’s name.

Today’s Beer: Space Waltz!

Space Waltz is a Vienna Lager. When we were brainstorming the beer and looking for the right name, we landed on Space Waltz as a nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey and the iconic use of Johann Strauss II’s “The Blue Danube.” Since Strauss was born in Vienna, the reference felt like a perfect match for the style.

The Label

Our designer began sketching concepts while researching about the movie, and midway through she realized this would be the perfect label to have some fun with AI. In the film, the HAL 9000 computer—an AI-powered system—begins to act against the astronauts once it realizes they intend to disconnect it. This leads to some tense scenes between human and machine, ultimately sending the main astronaut on a mind-bending journey through space and time.

The movie’s themes about technology gaining control over its creators feels eerily relevant today. AI is quickly becoming a tool used across almost every industry, a tool that can empower us, but one we also have to be careful not to let dominate us.

Although we still plan for our designer to create our labels - and this is the only label we've generated with AI - she felt this was the perfect moment to have some fun with AI: the name tied to the movie, the movie tied to AI, and the broader conversation the film started decades ago. If there was ever a label to experiment with AI, it was this one.

When we released the beer, we expected some backlash... and we definitely got it. Even one of our Account Managers was super nervous about it. We chose not to explain the inspiration because we wanted to see how people would react. Sure enough, it sparked a lively discourse about AI in design. :)

We love labels that get people talking—we’ve done this before with beers like Foxy, and even our very first Clock Out label caused a stir. Our first Clock Out labels had random posts from random people from Twitter talking about how much they loved to Clock Out. One of the quotes included the word “f*ck,” and this didn’t sit well with some liquor stores... but after going through the commentary, we realized it was the perfect start of the beer release so that it would start a conversation. We think it's awesome people have different opinions - some people loved that this label was made with Ai, some people hated it and that was the whole point. 

As much as we like to have fun with our beer flavours, we also like to have fun with our labels. You’ve gotta enjoy what you do. So cheers to an awesome Vienna Lager — we hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed making (and the process designing the label for) it.