December 2008

There are also beercoasters in Hawaii:
COR employee Bettina Costa has an unusual hobby

She drinks now and then a beer, but actually she prefers wine:

Bettina Costa collects since 2001 beercoasters. And with this unusual hobby she is already a celebrity in the world of collecting brewery items. With more than 20,000 beercoasters, among which there are true treasures from the first half of the last century, she possesses the largest visible beercoaster collection in the world.

Under www.coaster.ch you can have a look at the beercoasters, each of them scanned and organized in countries and breweries... and dream of a holiday in a faraway country and its corresponding beer.

Bettina was born in Argentina and moved scarcely 7 years ago to Switzerland, for love.

And it was also her husband and his family who awoke in Bettina the collecting passion: “All of them collected something. Of course, I didn't want to be inferior and one day I came across a beercoaster – something that in Argentina was not so common”, says Bettina.

The “first” was a beercoaster from the swiss Warteck brewery. By now, they are more than 20,000 pieces from 2,600 breweries from 167 different countries. And the collection grows continually: “Basically, I neither buy, nor sell beercoasters, I only exchange them. That's why it is always important to get as many double pieces as possible”.

In the vast international scene, in part due to this non-lucrative position, she has already a name and she receives frequently donations. Even her great passion, painting, was perfectly combined with her hobby in 2005: BarbaRoja brewery in Argentina printed beercoasters with some of her paintings.

Apart from her husband who helps Bettina with the time-consuming task of scanning and archiving, also her colleagues in Frenkendorf are a real support. There works Bettina in the area of Software Testing and Quality Assurance and receives from colleagues, whenever possible, new and exotic pieces. The beercoasters are organized according to the country of the brewery and independently of their condition: used, dirty, written - for this reason there are surely some open bills in the collection...

By de way: “Bierdeckel” (Bier: beer - Deckel: cover) means beercoaster in German. This confusing term is due to the pleasant custom of drinking beer in the open air. As a “cover”, it protects the brewage against dirt and insects. Today it is also used as advertising medium and as a collection article. Now, only one question arises: Who has invented the beercoaster¡ No, not the Swiss, but the Germans, in 1892 in Dresden.