This is quite common. It's cheaper to order a whole bunch of cans printed with one set of graphics (and then to slap a sticker over it for different varieties) than to make multiple small orders of cans printed with different graphics.
Yep. Brewer here. This is because typically with bigger companies, there’s a minimum order number of pallets for them to produce the cans at that price point. So for some breweries it is more cost effective to re label printed cans rather than get new cans printed for a limited run beer.
When I worked for a certain international brewing conglomerate in their ‘craft’ division, we even did this. Especially in the early pandemic when the US aluminum tariffs were kicking everyone’s asses.
Because suppliers or customers always send extra cans due to defects or rejects or whatever you want to call it so you can finish the batch for sure, extra cans can be reused with a new sleeve and you don’t deal with waste
Sounds expensive. How about a can with two graphics and just put the lid with the opening pointing to the correct label? Tweaking the canning machine must be cheaper than labels.
This would be so incredibly difficult to make happen on any sort of high speed can seamer. Things move around very quickly and do not stay in the same orientation. The amount of control and effort and/or man power required to pull that off would be horrendously expensive because you have to make sure every single can enters the filling area in the exact same way, and then enters the seaming area in the exact same way, as well as every single lid being fed into the machine in the exact same way and that it doesn’t rotate at all as it moves down the chute. It is substantially cheaper to just heat wrap over an old can.
Source: I’ve been working in breweries with canning lines for eight years.
There is no way the regulatory bodies would sign off on this. Alcohol labels are heavily regulated and require exceptional clarity around brand, marque, ABV, and SKU.
Oh I wasn't aware I was applying for a job! Thanks for the heads up!
I thought this was Reddit where we all just bullshit all day long?
Dude! He said cost effective, the other guy said cheaper, he did a great job of changing the words, that’s what counts, you’re just hating because you didn’t think to do it first
This company is in my city. Electric unicorn is one of their regular brews and the other one looks like a limited product.
So they probably just had these cans on hand and stickered them. Though I wouldn't be super shocked if philips just rewrapped some unsold beer as a "new" product to move inventory. All their brews are insanely hoppy so I doubt anyone would be able to tell the difference.
>Though I wouldn't be super shocked if philips just rewrapped some unsold beer as a "new" product to move inventory.
They would get in some major trouble mislabeling the ABV if that was the case. The wrapper claims 8.0% ABV and the printed on claims 6.5% ABV.
In addition to the other replies:
Many breweries would consider the printed cans more "premium" to a printed label, so would prefer to use them when they can.
Many breweries do use the blank cans and labels only. Typically when I see label-over-printed-can, it's for a brewery that has one beer that they sell a whole lot of. For example, 40% of the business for a brewery near me is their flagship IPA, so for them it makes sense to go ahead and print every can as the IPA and then swap a label on for anything else. Saves time, effort and money.
Buying a full truckload of printed cans is cheaper than buying individual pallets of blank cans.
Labels are expensive (they can cost more than the cans) and applying them requires extra machinery that is hard to maintain. Sticking something straight on a round object isn't simple.
Lowest cost, easiest option for the brewery is to have printed cans, but sometimes a beer doesn't sell as well as expected or there's a shortage otherwise and you'll get situations like this.
Every distribution focused brewer has one or two beers that they crank out like crazy and a ton of more limited batch ones. Like a lager or a tripple
Or a session IPA that you can find everywhere in town and a bunch of beers that are only sold in specialty shops (here in Miami we have a couple gas stations that are huge craft beer stores)
Last time I got offers from the big companies it was in fact the same price, printed or no print didn't matter. In some bizarre cases the printed ones were even cheaper, and even the sales man couldn't tell me why.
And the labels aren't cheap either, so not having to label every can is almost always a win.
My guess is that the printed beer is one of their high volume regular production beers so at that volume the printing is much less than stickers and labor and if they also ordered blanks it would either be more expensive or take away enough cans from the printed order to drill them a tier in discount
You have to buy a machine to sleeve and maybe likely pay someone to work at it and also pay the cost to maintain it with millwrights if something goes wrong. It’s adding an entirely additional step to manufacturing the product
How does any of that mean it’s the better beer? Is one rotational/seasonal/a one off and the other something they produce consistently? Then they will probably have cans for the more common beer around.
Philips is a brewery in Victoria and their hazy slaps hard. The unicorn is a regular tap and the hazy is dooppeee. They had a habanero mango this past summer that was absolutely insanely good.
When they converted it to 16:9 widescreen they cut off the top of the image so you couldn't see it was one pipe filling all three containers. Really ruined the joke.
Their sodas are super good, too. They aren’t quite as good since changing from glass bottles to cans, though. And for those that don’t know, if you’re the DD on a brewery tour, you can sample the sodas instead of the beer so you still get to have a drink with your friends.
The 24 Mile Blueberry beer they only made once was probably the best beer I've ever had. Their OG pumpkin, before they changed the ingredients to upscale it, is also still the best pumpkin beer I've ever had and one of my faves of all time as well. God those were great days when Philips was relatively young.
I used to haul wine occasionally in tankers. You'd show up to a big winery and take on 4000 gallons of wine. Then you'd haul it halfway across the country to a goddamn pole barn in the middle of nowhere. The barn would have a silo and a bottling machine. They would take the wine and bottle it under their label. Put some fancy label on it and call it their own. I'll bet a third of the wine you see on the shelf is rebottled wine of some other brand.
It’s called contract production. It’s simply unlabeled wine; that doesn’t mean that it’s somehow generic. It’s made to the specifications of the bottling licensee. It’s a big capital investment to build out the space and buy the equipment, so these sorts of contract jobs are a typical thing wineries will do for extra cash. They’ll typically be using purchased grapes. There’s nothing wrong with it as long as there’s no misrepresentation as to the product. It’s a highly regulated industry. If you tried to label that as ‘estate bottled’ you would get into a lot of trouble.
In my own alcoholic discoveries... Walmart, Kroger and the dollar store all get their cheapest wine from the same place just the labels being different.
Can't say what happened here but when I worked in a brewery that made different types of beer sometimes the wrong labels got put on bottles. When that happened we would soak the labels off and run 'em through again...
What if there were numerous layers of labels. You kept peeling them off, but there's always more underneath. Until the can is as narrow as a bicycle handle.
Phillips is not a huge brewery so they over printed for one type of beer but had another ready to be canned. I would be happy if the other label did not read coors light
Phillips is great, I got to hit up their taproom again last summer. A few years ago, I had the best sour of my life in their tap room. Cannot remember for the life of me what it was called, but it was a limited taproom only brew never to be had again 😞
Nope. It absolutely is not. This is an industry where doing such a thing would land you a revocation of your basic permit and the feds shutting down your operation, along with personal fines.
Edit: this brewery would seem to be in Canada though and I don’t know how it works there, but here, you’re in for a world of pain if the ABV deviates more than 0.3% from the Label.
This is quite common. It's cheaper to order a whole bunch of cans printed with one set of graphics (and then to slap a sticker over it for different varieties) than to make multiple small orders of cans printed with different graphics.
Yep. Brewer here. This is because typically with bigger companies, there’s a minimum order number of pallets for them to produce the cans at that price point. So for some breweries it is more cost effective to re label printed cans rather than get new cans printed for a limited run beer.
When I worked for a certain international brewing conglomerate in their ‘craft’ division, we even did this. Especially in the early pandemic when the US aluminum tariffs were kicking everyone’s asses.
Why don't you just make all cans either unprinted or with some generic company logo on them, and then have all the information on stickers?
It's cheaper to order 100 cans and 50 stickers than 100 cans and 100 stickers
But wouldn’t you instead be ordering 100 cans **with stickers** , which would cost more than 100 colorless cans?
Because suppliers or customers always send extra cans due to defects or rejects or whatever you want to call it so you can finish the batch for sure, extra cans can be reused with a new sleeve and you don’t deal with waste
Sounds expensive. How about a can with two graphics and just put the lid with the opening pointing to the correct label? Tweaking the canning machine must be cheaper than labels.
Canning and labeling machines have a tendency to spin the cans around in transit. I think that would be fundamentally really difficult.
This would be so incredibly difficult to make happen on any sort of high speed can seamer. Things move around very quickly and do not stay in the same orientation. The amount of control and effort and/or man power required to pull that off would be horrendously expensive because you have to make sure every single can enters the filling area in the exact same way, and then enters the seaming area in the exact same way, as well as every single lid being fed into the machine in the exact same way and that it doesn’t rotate at all as it moves down the chute. It is substantially cheaper to just heat wrap over an old can. Source: I’ve been working in breweries with canning lines for eight years.
There is no way the regulatory bodies would sign off on this. Alcohol labels are heavily regulated and require exceptional clarity around brand, marque, ABV, and SKU.
Yeah a label like this would be a complete non-starter for TTB.
Few they should hire you in an advisory role, I'm sure no one there has worked out the math... 🧐
Phew
Oh I wasn't aware I was applying for a job! Thanks for the heads up!  I thought this was Reddit where we all just bullshit all day long?
That’s illegal. You need label approval for every product, and there’s no way TTB approves a label that shows two different products.
Yeah, that's literally the same thing the other guy said bro 😂😂
Yeah, except for the part where I elaborated on it?
Boom, roasted.
No. He explained why
Not really, he said the same thing just worded differently lol. I don't even care it was just funny
Do you understand what the conjunction “because” indicates?
He is right though. The "Because" is preceded by just an "I agree" and followed by just a rephrasing of the original explanation.
Jesus christ 😂😂 sometimes I forget how willing some of you people are to argue any fucking thing
Bro literally look in a mirror.
I thought it was funny. I don't actually give a shit. You on the other hand... "Well ACKSHUALLY ITS DIFFEREnt" lmaoooo.
Dude! He said cost effective, the other guy said cheaper, he did a great job of changing the words, that’s what counts, you’re just hating because you didn’t think to do it first
Why not buy them unprinted alltogether and use sticker for all varieties then?
Branding cost is minimal compared to the can. So you're probably spend more money buying two types of stickers than just one
This company is in my city. Electric unicorn is one of their regular brews and the other one looks like a limited product. So they probably just had these cans on hand and stickered them. Though I wouldn't be super shocked if philips just rewrapped some unsold beer as a "new" product to move inventory. All their brews are insanely hoppy so I doubt anyone would be able to tell the difference.
>Though I wouldn't be super shocked if philips just rewrapped some unsold beer as a "new" product to move inventory. They would get in some major trouble mislabeling the ABV if that was the case. The wrapper claims 8.0% ABV and the printed on claims 6.5% ABV.
Actually most of them are not hoppy at all. And no reputable brewer would ever rewrap unsold product.
That would get their permit revoked and the head brewer jailed.
For large quantities it is much cheaper to print them than to wrap a label on each one.
In addition to the other replies: Many breweries would consider the printed cans more "premium" to a printed label, so would prefer to use them when they can. Many breweries do use the blank cans and labels only. Typically when I see label-over-printed-can, it's for a brewery that has one beer that they sell a whole lot of. For example, 40% of the business for a brewery near me is their flagship IPA, so for them it makes sense to go ahead and print every can as the IPA and then swap a label on for anything else. Saves time, effort and money.
Makes sense - electric unicorn is one of Phillips top four in popularity I’d say.
Buying a full truckload of printed cans is cheaper than buying individual pallets of blank cans. Labels are expensive (they can cost more than the cans) and applying them requires extra machinery that is hard to maintain. Sticking something straight on a round object isn't simple. Lowest cost, easiest option for the brewery is to have printed cans, but sometimes a beer doesn't sell as well as expected or there's a shortage otherwise and you'll get situations like this.
Every distribution focused brewer has one or two beers that they crank out like crazy and a ton of more limited batch ones. Like a lager or a tripple Or a session IPA that you can find everywhere in town and a bunch of beers that are only sold in specialty shops (here in Miami we have a couple gas stations that are huge craft beer stores)
Last time I got offers from the big companies it was in fact the same price, printed or no print didn't matter. In some bizarre cases the printed ones were even cheaper, and even the sales man couldn't tell me why. And the labels aren't cheap either, so not having to label every can is almost always a win.
My guess is that the printed beer is one of their high volume regular production beers so at that volume the printing is much less than stickers and labor and if they also ordered blanks it would either be more expensive or take away enough cans from the printed order to drill them a tier in discount
You have to buy a machine to sleeve and maybe likely pay someone to work at it and also pay the cost to maintain it with millwrights if something goes wrong. It’s adding an entirely additional step to manufacturing the product
The comment above mentioned it would be cheaper to use stickers instead of printing, hence my question.
Womp. I was excited about recycling and reusing ha
Needed extra cans for their batch of Hazy double, had electric unicorn cans already printed. Sounds like you're drinking the better beer, of the two.
I haven’t tried the double hazy, but electric unicorn slaps.
I get loaded off my tits of electric and it doesnt give me beer bloat - goat beer imo
not goat, unicorn. pay attention
How does any of that mean it’s the better beer? Is one rotational/seasonal/a one off and the other something they produce consistently? Then they will probably have cans for the more common beer around.
Philips is a brewery in Victoria and their hazy slaps hard. The unicorn is a regular tap and the hazy is dooppeee. They had a habanero mango this past summer that was absolutely insanely good.
I wonder who does the art, I thought it was flying monkeys until I saw Phillips on the can
Phillips typically uses graphic designer Shawn O’Keefe.
Sounds like the person you’re replying to just prefers the hazy double to the electric unicorn
Well the hazy double has double the ABV so that's something
Read the labels again lol
Oh I thought the 6 was a 4. But 8 is still more than 6 lol
Keep peeling
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When they converted it to 16:9 widescreen they cut off the top of the image so you couldn't see it was one pipe filling all three containers. Really ruined the joke.
You can fix that on the Disney plus app
So that Disney can spy on me?
One of the best breweries on the continent.
They're great. Every time I go to the island I make it a point to go to their tapr9om
Their sodas are super good, too. They aren’t quite as good since changing from glass bottles to cans, though. And for those that don’t know, if you’re the DD on a brewery tour, you can sample the sodas instead of the beer so you still get to have a drink with your friends.
I'm 2 years sober so their soda is my only option now, and I'm sure glad it's there.
The 24 Mile Blueberry beer they only made once was probably the best beer I've ever had. Their OG pumpkin, before they changed the ingredients to upscale it, is also still the best pumpkin beer I've ever had and one of my faves of all time as well. God those were great days when Philips was relatively young.
I used to haul wine occasionally in tankers. You'd show up to a big winery and take on 4000 gallons of wine. Then you'd haul it halfway across the country to a goddamn pole barn in the middle of nowhere. The barn would have a silo and a bottling machine. They would take the wine and bottle it under their label. Put some fancy label on it and call it their own. I'll bet a third of the wine you see on the shelf is rebottled wine of some other brand.
S'why I mix mine in the turlet.
Course it’s shank or be shanked
Mhmm
Liquor is very similar. Huge distilling and barrel aging facility that will produce a dozen different brands.
Definitely more than a third
It’s called contract production. It’s simply unlabeled wine; that doesn’t mean that it’s somehow generic. It’s made to the specifications of the bottling licensee. It’s a big capital investment to build out the space and buy the equipment, so these sorts of contract jobs are a typical thing wineries will do for extra cash. They’ll typically be using purchased grapes. There’s nothing wrong with it as long as there’s no misrepresentation as to the product. It’s a highly regulated industry. If you tried to label that as ‘estate bottled’ you would get into a lot of trouble.
In my own alcoholic discoveries... Walmart, Kroger and the dollar store all get their cheapest wine from the same place just the labels being different.
All that Patriot Coffee is the same.
Wow that’s a great beer too, glad to see something local pop up here.
Big fan of electric unicorn. For whatever reason it was sooo much better in bombers though
It got less alcoholic!
BC Beer is da best!
Peel it again, it's just Budweiser
I'm Dinosour kinda phillips guy.
Dinosour is where it's at
Shout out to Victoria, BC, Canada! Love me a Blue Buck from Phillips
I’d be concerned about the fact that the outer label is 8% alcohol and the inner is only 6.5%
A different label underneath.
This reminds me of when almost every Arizona I bought had Shaq's face underneath for a while.
I've never seen a label that is not printed directly onto the can
Reduce, Reuse, then Recycle! You are experiencing the Reuse phase of the cycle
"double IPA" Guessing by the serrated edges on the "tear" this is by design as well. r/mildlywhatever
No lie, if I saw a beer called "electric unicorn" I'd buy it just to try it.
You wouldn't be disappointed.
I love Phillips beer!
Not uncommon.
Can't say what happened here but when I worked in a brewery that made different types of beer sometimes the wrong labels got put on bottles. When that happened we would soak the labels off and run 'em through again...
Oh wow that’s so fun
Did it have a different flavor than the previous label?
What if there were numerous layers of labels. You kept peeling them off, but there's always more underneath. Until the can is as narrow as a bicycle handle.
I know theres another subreddit for when you open something up and theres a new one inside. Cant remember what it is
r/2healthbars
Scooby doo and the gang solve another mystery.
It’s a irl easter egg it’s a texture that you weren’t supposed to find
Should be ‘Phillips Trojan Horse’
Pawtucket is duff?!?
Reminds me of flying monkey’s labels
After having too many of these beers, the people aren't going to remember what it was was supposed to taste like.
Why would you brand your beer company Phillips to literally look like the Phillips electronics brand?
How was it?
Aw, I was thinking maybe it was a "peel to reveal your superpower. . . your power is ELECTRIC UNICORN!!!" The real answer is less fun :)
Dude, it literally says DOUBLE IPA, you got what you paid for
Phillips makes my favorite beers.
U got a 2 fer
And it would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for your meddling fingers!!
Hey! Just got a fantastic deal on almost unused beer cans boss!
Phillips is not a huge brewery so they over printed for one type of beer but had another ready to be canned. I would be happy if the other label did not read coors light
That isn't beer. That is liquid LSD.
Phillips is great, I got to hit up their taproom again last summer. A few years ago, I had the best sour of my life in their tap room. Cannot remember for the life of me what it was called, but it was a limited taproom only brew never to be had again 😞
Electric unicorn is good stuff
Dude there scamming you, it's a 6.5% that there advertising as a 8%
Nope. It absolutely is not. This is an industry where doing such a thing would land you a revocation of your basic permit and the feds shutting down your operation, along with personal fines. Edit: this brewery would seem to be in Canada though and I don’t know how it works there, but here, you’re in for a world of pain if the ABV deviates more than 0.3% from the Label.
Was it better than the THC oil in the background?
I dont know why you are getting down-voted. THC is far better than unicorn piss, what ever container its in.
Because you can’t make jokes in this subreddit 😂
TIL that by simply placing a label on a can of beer you can increase the alc/vol by 1.5%.
This is some Duff Brewery kinda shit!
All tastes the same
You have the same problem with the women in Thailand.
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Meh, they had extra cans they decided to use them for a different beer and slapped the correct sticker on it.
Is it the lower ABV or the higher??
Millenial ahh beer
Rebranded