How To Brew Beer With LEGO Bricks?

Be that stout or lager, easy-peasy, LEGO squeezy, pour it in a glass, say cheers, and…

Hold on for a hoppy second there! I can’t possibly be suggesting that beer, both stout or lager, can be made with LEGO bricks, can I? Yes, I can. That’s precisely what I’m suggesting. What I’m not recommending is that you drink it. That, I definitely don’t advise. Please don’t drink the two beers I am about to introduce to you. That would be very bad, and would leave me a couple of thousand LEGO bricks short. 🤣

Part of a growing list of LEGO MOCs I wanted to build, I had two somewhat unusual, dare I say, original ideas — build some LEGO beer. Everyone knows I love discovering new beers, and it sounded like both a fun idea and one I had all the necessary pieces for, so I did just that. I built a stout — let’s call it Guinness — and a lager — let’s call it undefined horse-piss, which is what most lagers are. 😈 Brand doesn’t really matter though, as long as they’re served in the right glass, which I totally didn’t have, so, believe it or not, I went down to the shop and bought a Guinness glass and a traditional unbranded tankard.

Now that I had something to pour my beer into, I had another problem. No self-respecting beer drinker drinks beer without a beer mat, so I found myself having to build two of them as well, not just the beers. Fun! Like, genuinely! 😁 And I am literally going to get a beer now as I write this, cause mentioning the word “beer” a gazillion times makes me want one. Hold my pen. Brb!

One can-cracking, beer-pouring later…

The beer mats

I needed two separate ones, because I didn’t think reusing the same mat from the stout would work for the lager, or vice-versa, and there was a good reason for that. More often than not, when you get a nice pint of stout, be that Guinness or something else, the head will drip a bit, and it, having a very thick head compared to a lager, leaves a more visible stain on the mat. The same is only partially true when it comes to lagers. Sure, they might drip a bit, but not as visibly.

As you can see from the picture, I decided to follow the same colour scheme of the stout and go with a plain black mat, though when it comes to Guinness specifically, you might want to know that it’s actually not black, just very dark ruby red, but of course, its consistency makes it appear black. But anyway, that’s not a colour we have in the LEGO universe, so black it was, after all, even some of the locals call it “the black stuff”.

What breaks the plainness of the black mat is the nice stains I built into it with tan tiles. Some of it taking the round shape of the glass’ base, and then a few additional drops right next to the mark the glass left. For something that I really didn’t think much of before, I think it turned out pretty darn well.

The lager mat had to be very different, and this time I couldn’t go with the stained mat idea, so I had to come up with something else. Believe it or not, this was an even more ad-hoc idea than the Guinness mat. I didn’t want to brand it, but I did want to make it creative enough to look good, so I built out of tiles a charming little tankard with nice gold beer and some foam at the top, and I think it looks great!

The beers

Why Guinness? Come on, it’s like the most famous beer there is, regardless of what Heineken and Carlsberg people might think. OK, maybe Corona would be a close second, but we’re talking about a stout here. One of the biggest exports of Ireland is Irish pubs and Guinness. Period. So, Guinness it was.

For the stout itself, I used a few hundred — I didn’t exactly count — black Technic pins. Perhaps many people would have thought first of using 1×1 round or square black plates, but I thought why not mix it up and make good use of the trillion Technic pins I have sitting in a box doing nothing? Turns out they make a great Guinness!

The head had to meet two criteria. Firstly, it had to be the right colour, so tan felt appropriate enough. White would have definitely not worked. The second criteria was the thickness of the head, which traditionally has to be around 2 cm, so to stay close to that, I used square 1×1 tan plates.

It isn’t sheer perfection, but anyone who knows me, also knows, I am happy with good enough, and I think what I managed to pull off, meets that expectation and then some. Paired with the nicely stained mat, I think it looks gorgeous. I even added a drip to the side of the glass, which is perhaps the bit I am least satisfied with, but again, good enough.

The lager, or as I like to call it, horse-piss on tap, was a somewhat simpler “build”, and it only happened now, because I got lucky at the LEGO store pick-a-brick wall the other day, as they had transparent round yellow 1×1 plates. I bought a whole large cup worth of them.

As a small side-note, let me just remind y’all, if you want dirt-cheap LEGO, find a shop, go to the pick-a-brick wall and knock yourself out. It is by far the cheapest way to get The LEGO you actually want. Sure, they won’t have all the pieces, but you can build up an impressive multi-thousand piece collection for anywhere between 50–100 bucks. Don’t get addicted, though… 🤣

But back to my pint of lager, on top of the beer, we all know there is usually foam. I was debating whether I should use colourless transparent bricks or white and decided to go with white because it felt a tad more realistic. I ended up using 1×1 round white tiles. I have a shit-tonne of them from the three Floral Art sets I own — out of which I only built one, so plenty of leftovers to work with.

I think it looks presentable, especially paired with the beer mat illustrating the very same beer sitting on it, and just to show off my Irishness, I made sure the tankard made some reference to Dublin, Ireland. 🇮🇪☘️

More “brewing” to come…

These were my first-ever attempts to “brewing” beer with LEGO bricks, and I am quite delighted with the results. I will eventually want to improve on these though, perhaps even build the glass itself with LEGO bricks.

I have plenty more ideas to show off soon, so follow and subscribe to get those in your inbox as soon as they go live. I also have an Instagram account where you can follow me, and discover other LEGO builds I post.

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.