In case you didn’t know, your homey Ale loves some hats. This fact, coupled with my love for cool hunting, made me gravitate to the “Tarp Hat” made by the Greenville, NC-based company called Real Deal Brazil. This hat initially caught my eyes in the 2009 blockbuster flick Zombieland which featured Woody Harrelson rocking it while while slaughtering decomposed flesh eaters, but when Real Deal took the coolness even further and added an optional band laced with bottle caps, I was sold!
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The hat itself is made from the authentic, recycled tarps that actually covered cargo trucks transporting goods throughout Brazil (which explains the company name since they are based in North Carolina). Now that’s cool already, but they took it to the next level for beer lovers like us by embellishing it with tops that come from some of the nation’s most well-respected microbreweries including Great Lakes Brewery out of Cleveland, OH; Shmaltz Brewery reppin’ New York, Michigan’s Bell’s, Great Divide in Denver and their nearby hero, Duck Rabbit.
“Our aim is always to include as wide a variety of quality beer brands among our caps as possible, with our home-state North Carolina brewers strongly represented, particularly top regionals like World Beer Cup gold-medal winner Duck-Rabbit in Farmville,” company rep Frank Rabey says. “We also mix in caps from some of the tastier and more interesting imports, and even a couple craft hard ciders.” You gotta love how they are showing love to the micros. Real Deal emphasizes that they only use tops from breweries that are not what they term “…too pervasive in the marketplace,” i.e. Heineken.
So how do they make these killer bands? Rabey explains, “Consistently getting any quantity of quality used craft-beer caps is a challenge, though the actual crafting of our hat bands itself is very straightforward: We cleanly double-punch all caps so they slide easily onto the strong synthetic cord, then uniformly space them a meager distance apart, affixing them with a high-melt-point glue.” Crafty!
Anyway, check out their site for more of their pimpin’ products including the Iguape Messenger Bag that I definitely want to get! Just go to realdealbrazil.com and see what else they have in their arsenal. (For specifically the beer band, click the link for “Tarp Hats” and scroll midway down, to "Beer Cap Hat Band - Craft Beer.")
Cheers!
Ale