beer, buddies, buffoonery
In case you're not familiar with Deep Rock Galactic, it's a cooperative first-person shooter video game where you and up to three other players are a group of dwarves who need to complete tasks such as mining for minerals, collecting items, and defeating enemies - while fending off swarms of bugs that don't really appreciate you pillaging their homeworld.
It's a lighthearted, silly game that encourages teamwork and camaraderie, and I've been obsessed with it ever since my boyfriend and our friend got me into the game in February 2023. So of course, for my boyfriend's birthday in November 2023, I decided to give him a Deep Rock-themed birthday!
The lobby of the game features the Abyss Bar, where you and your teammates can choose from a selection of 25 different beers (27 as of February 2024, with the addition of the Best Wurst Beer and Hidden Dwarf) - a handful of which have effects that help you during your mission, and the rest of which are just for fun.
I decided to make a case of these beers for the IRL party!
First, I made a spreadsheet of the beers in the game, and what their in-game descriptions are. It was easy enough to copy/paste from the wiki. I added a column for my own notes, where I wrote down some highlights from the in-game description that would help me find real beers that have roughly the same qualities. There are some pretty fantastical descriptions, but I wasn't going for perfect replicas, just something that's vaguely close to the descriptions I'd be putting on the bottles.
Then, I took this spreadsheet to my local liquor store that not only has a great selection of craft beers but also has an option to mix-and-match individual bottles into six-packs. I explained this all to the guy working there, and he helped me pick out beers that matched each of my rough descriptions as best as possible.
Next was time for some graphic design! The official Deep Rock Galactic website has a link to their Press Kit, which includes an entire set of beer labels - or at least, the logos for each of the beers. I wanted the beers I was making to also include description labels like real beers do, so I used each logo's color schemes and styles to design description labels that go with each logo - with sizes that work for the bottles I picked out.
Then, I printed out each of the labels onto sticker-backed paper:
This was a trickier task than I anticipated - I don't use my color printer very often, and it was acting up. First, it wasn't printing at all - the ink had dried up because I hadn't used it recently. I soaked the cartridge in water for a while and managed to get it working a little bit, but ultimately ended up buying new ink. It still ended up not being perfect quality print, but I felt like the labels looked good enough for this project.
Next was the arduous process of removing the original labels from each of the beers.
Some of them came off really easily, but others needed to be soaked in warm water for a while and even then some of the glue would stay stuck to the bottle. I covered up any ugly parts as best as possible with my labels, but some beers definitely look better than others!
There are two beers that are particularly special - Blackout Stout and Leaf Lovers. In the game, Blackout Stout will make you instantly black out, and Leaf Lovers will make you instantly sober. For my Leaf Lovers, I decided to go with a non-alcoholic sparkling juice so that any friends who didn't drink could still appreciate the "beers".
I turned the whole four-pack of Izze into Leaf Lovers, and made a label for the box as well as each of the bottles - especially because I had 25 beers to make and my case could only hold 24.
For the Blackout Stout, I found a soda bottle with a twist-off cap, poured the soda into a glass for me to drink separately, filled the bottle completely with rum, and twisted the cap back on.
This worked out even better than intended - one party guest arrived late after a hard day at work and was curious about the Blackout Stout. We warned him that it was just straight rum, but he downed half the bottle in one go and passed out for the evening not long afterwards.
After decorating all the bottles, I realized that I still had a cardboard box that wasn't very exciting and needed some decoration - but didn't have much time left to decorate. I used DALL-E on Bing to generate some quick AI art to decorate the outside of the box:
I printed each of these onto its own sheet of sticker paper and stuck one on each side of the cardboard box.
I included a printout of a the cheat sheet that lists all the beers along with their real-life names and descriptions (copied down from the beer labels before I tore them off):
I also noticed that several bottlecaps had some logos that didn't go well with their Deep-Rock-themed beers, so I dug through my sticker box and added small stickers to the tops of any bottlecaps that didn't make sense - some were just colored circles, others were stars or symbols that made sense with their beer, like a heart for Burning Love or a snowflake for Arkenstout.
In addition to the beer, I also made a Deep Rock Galactic-themed birthday cake!
I made a chocolate cake (just a box mix, substituting milk for water and butter for oil) with a cherry filling and a reddish-brown icing flavored with a little bit of cocoa and almond extract.
I'm having trouble finding the exact recipe I used for the cherry filling (maybe this one?), but I used frozen sweet cherries and a cherry pie filling recipe.
In the game, one of the things you can find while mining is a huge chunk of Compressed Gold. It's tradition for all the players to ping the gold saying "We're Rich" until Mission Control complains and tells you to get back to work.
I made a compressed gold to hide in the cake like a baby in a King Cake. I melted some chocolate and formed it roughly in the shape of a compressed gold, and rolled it in edible gold glitter. After baking the cake, I stuck my chocolate gold chunk into the cake to be found when the cake is cut there.
I then decorated the cake with rock candy and candy rocks (chunks of chocolate with a candy coating that makes them look like real rocks). I chose the red and green rock candy sticks because they look the most like some of the minerals found in-game - red sugar and umanite.
I thought I had previously seen candy rocks in a particular candy shop near me but wasn't able to find them this time, so I got them on Amazon. (I did get the rock candy at my local shop while I was there.)
And to complete the theme, we also visited a cavern!
If you want to download my beer labels and cheat sheet, here are the pdfs!:
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