Black, matches my tattoo.
Oh man, where did that week just go? It seems like a day ago I was heading down to the Amsterdam Brewery for the launch party for BBbarfly, makers of one of the nicest bottle openers around. After Troy and Nick’s TBW 6 Month Pub Crawl last Saturday, a contingent of us headed down to Amsterdam for some launch party fun, with the crew from BBbarfly.
If you’ve missed earlier posts, BBbarfly is a Toronto company that makes beautiful bottle openers based on butterfly knives, where the blade is replaced with an opener. Cool idea, and a very well-executed one. The openers, which are made in Canada, are well designed and built. With powder-coated handles, they are easily brandable, for anything from breweries to bars to events. We were pretty excited to get to go meet the people invovled in the company, hang out and drink great beer, and play with our very own BBbarfly openers.
We were met by Brian Becker, one of the dudes behind BBbarfly, who greeted us and started to show us some of his skills with the opener. Needless to say, he made it look easy. After dropping mine, I somehow managed to grab it in a semi-closed position with my finger between the handle and the opener. Had it been an actual knife, I would now have a clever name like “Nicky Nine-fingers”. As it was, I just demonstrated that, despite having been raised in Scarborough, I have no experience with fancy swingy-flippy knives.
Amsterdam was using the upstairs area above the brewery to host the party, and it was hiply industrial (it is actually a brewery…) with a decent bar, a lounge area and lots of space for drinking and dancing. I was quite impressed with the set-up, and am actually surprised there aren’t more events hosted in the space.
As the crowd started to fill in, the lovely Amsterdam bartenders became more and more experimental with their openers, inventing some clever ways to entertain the semi drunk. The sounds of metallic clicking and the occasional drop became the background noise, though the DJ tried his hardest to keep up. Between trying to be a ninja and not loose and fingers, we got into some Big Wheel, and munchies. With pizzas and stuff on the way, my 5 hours of walking and drinking caught up with me, and I had to make an early departure. The room was filling up though, and dancing critical mass seemed about to be reached (another good reason for me not to be around). All reports were that the party kept bumping, and happily moved on to the afterparty. Those guys know how to do it.
I’m happy to report that I discovered upon waking up that I’m actually not so bad with the would-be knife-skills, once I have my normal dexterity back. With a bit of practice, I’ve become nearly okay at it using it. As an opener, aside from the cool design, it’s length lends itself well to opening caps easily, leveraging like mad. I really like it. Plus I feel cool whipping it out like a nine-fingered ninja and opening a bottle for someone.
Cheers to Brian and his crew, both for the great party, and for taking the chance to start up a small business. You guys are doing great work, keep it up!
