realmeh (OP)
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November 24, 2025, 10:50:04 PM |
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TL;DR: I put real sats inside real beer. You crack the bottle, scan the cap, see how many sats you won, and then you claim them to your wallet.
Hello Bitcointalk. I'm Altan from Germany, a longtime Bitcoiner (and craft beer lover). I’m not a native English speaker, so bear with me. Today I finally want to share my project: Beer of Satoshi – a real beer with real sats under every cap. The idea was to mix the world’s best money with something as simple and social as drinking a beer.
How it started: The idea for Beer of Satoshi came up at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2024 (around block 865,028). A few of us were drinking and talking about adoption. Everyone has heard of Bitcoin now, but many people have never held a single sat or made a real transaction. At some point I thought: “Why not literally put sats into a beer?” As a German who grew up with beer culture, it felt like the perfect way to make Bitcoin less abstract and more fun. So I decided to brew a Bitcoin-themed lager and hide a little Bitcoin surprise under every cap.
What it is: Beer of Satoshi is a limited-edition German lager that rewards you with Bitcoin (satoshis) each time you open a bottle. Under each bottle cap there’s a QR code. When you open the beer and scan that QR code with your phone, it takes you to a website that instantly shows you how many sats you won. It can be something tiny like 21 sats or something bigger like 2,100, or even up to 1,000,000 sats. You don’t know until you scan it, and neither do I. It’s randomly assigned when the bottle is opened. It’s basically “drink beer, find sats” – a normal beer drinking experience plus a small Bitcoin prize draw. Our motto is “Drink beer, stack sats, support Bitcoin,” and we really mean it.
How it works technically: Under the crown cap of every bottle there is a normal QR code. Nothing fancy. When you scan it with your phone, it just opens a website in your browser. At that moment, our backend randomly assigns a sats amount to your cap from the pre-funded prize pool and shows you the result. The QR codes are not pre-loaded with a fixed amount of BTC; the reward is decided at the moment of scan by a random algorithm. So no one (not even us) knows how many sats any specific bottle will give until it’s opened and scanned. That way nobody can cherry pick the “good” bottles – every bottle has a fair chance. Only after the website shows your sats amount do we guide you on how to claim them. When you choose to claim, the website provides an LNURL-withdraw link. If you already have a Lightning wallet, you redeem with basically one click. The QR under the cap is not an LNURL – it’s a regular URL that shows the sats first. If you don’t have a wallet yet, the site walks you through installing one and then claiming. We’ve open-sourced the core reward selection algorithm on GitHub so people can check how it works. The goal is that anyone can verify the distribution and odds.
Reward distribution: Each Beer of Satoshi bottle will grant a random sats reward somewhere between 21 sats and 1,000,000 sats (0.01 BTC) for the luckiest winner. Out of a total genesis batch of 27,140 bottles, we’ve structured the rewards roughly like this: 1 bottle rewards 1,000,000 sats; 10 bottles give 100,000 sats; 100 bottles give 10,000 sats; 1,000 bottles give 2,100 sats; 2,000 bottles give 1,000 sats; and the remaining majority (over 24,000 bottles) each give a smaller random amount between 21 and 500 sats. So most people will get a few dozen or a few hundred sats, but a few lucky folks will get much more. Every bottle has sats, and because it’s random, opening a Beer of Satoshi always has that little “what did I get?” moment. Think of it like a scratch-off ticket or satsback, except your “scratch card” is a beer and the prize is Bitcoin.
Distribution model & availability: We brewed a one-time “Genesis” edition of 27,140 bottles in total. We originally planned for about 35,000, but part of the production run was damaged during brewing and bottling, so only 27,140 passed quality checks. Of those, 21,000 bottles were sold via online pre-sale (EU only), and the remaining 6,140 are for Bitcoin events and meetups. Once these are gone, they’re gone – we want the Genesis run to stay special. Online, we offer pack sizes from a single bottle up to full 24‑packs. We priced it roughly €7 per 330 ml bottle (so a 24-pack is around €168). That price covers brewing, logistics and the sats inside – there’s no crazy markup. We can only ship within Europe right now (alcohol rules), but people can also choose pickup at certain Bitcoin conferences to save on shipping and say hi in person.
Real-world testing and reception: Before and during the pre-sale, we tested Beer of Satoshi at different Bitcoin events in 2025 to make sure everything actually works with real people, not just on paper. We brought bottles to local twentyone meetups, gave some to no-coiners at a small pre-event, and then to bigger events like Plan B Forum (Lugano 2025), Bitcoin Amsterdam 2025, BTC Prague, and smaller meetups like the Blocktrainer Community event in Cologne, BTC Amsterdam meetups, etc. The response was very positive. So far, across all events, more than 860 Beer of Satoshi bottles have been opened and sats claimed (75%+ claim-rate). In total, around 223,000 satoshis have been distributed from all bottles. Watching people open a beer, flip the cap, scan, and suddenly see “you got X sats” has been really fun. The reactions – laughs, small flexes about who got more, people helping each other set up wallets – showed us the idea actually works in real life, not just as a nice concept.
Onboarding new Bitcoiners: A big part of why I built this is onboarding. I wanted something that gets people to touch Bitcoin for real without a lecture. That’s why we designed the flow like this: you only need a phone to start. You open the beer, scan the cap, and the website immediately tells you how many sats you won. No wallet needed just to see the result. Only then do we ask you to install a Lightning wallet if you want to actually claim those sats. At events we noticed a lot of people who took a Beer of Satoshi had never used Lightning before. But “there is Bitcoin in your beer” was enough motivation for them to try. We usually recommend easy wallets like Blink or Wallet of Satoshi (but any LN wallet works), they install it, scan again if needed, and within seconds they have sats in their first Lightning wallet. That moment often switches something in their head: suddenly Bitcoin isn’t abstract anymore. We call this “beer-boarding” – onboarding via beer. It’s simple, social, and not about getting rich; it’s about breaking the ice and getting people to make their first real Bitcoin transaction.
No token, no gimmicks – just sats and lager: I want to stress that Beer of Satoshi is a Bitcoin-only project. There is no token, no NFT, no side chain, no altcoin hidden behind it. Just beer and sats over Lightning. We’re not raising money through a coin; the initial production was paid from my own funds and support from Bitcoiners buying the beer. The beer itself is brewed in Germany according to the Reinheitsgebot purity law by a proper brewery, so even without sats it should be a decent drink. The sats under the cap are just a small thank-you and a way to spread Bitcoin. There’s no catch: if you buy a Beer of Satoshi, you get a beer and some sats. If you don’t claim them, nothing bad happens – you just drank a beer.
Giving back 2.1%: From day one we decided that 2.1% of all Beer of Satoshi sales should go to Bitcoin development and community initiatives. It’s a small nod to 21 million and a way to give something back. A piece of every bottle sold goes towards open-source Bitcoin projects, developers, education or nonprofit efforts in the space. Beer of Satoshi is meant to be part of Bitcoin culture, so it makes sense to support the people who build and grow that culture.
Open invitation to the community: Beer of Satoshi is by Bitcoiners, for Bitcoiners. I hope it also inspires other people to experiment with similar ideas. The algorithm behind the rewards is open source, and the concept itself is simple: everyday product + small sats reward = easy way to make Bitcoin real. If you want to adapt the idea in your region – with coffee, soda, chocolate, whatever – go for it. If you want to fork the code or just ask about the lessons we learned, I’m happy to share. If Beer of Satoshi ends up inspiring a wave of sats-backed products around the world, I would call that a win.
What’s next: As of now (late 2025), we’re fulfilling orders and shipping the Genesis edition to people who bought it. If you’re one of them, I’d love to see photos or hear your experience the first time you open a bottle and scan the cap. We’ll keep bringing Beer of Satoshi to meetups and conferences in Europe, so if you see us, come say hi and grab a beer. For the future, we’re looking into a possible second batch and maybe expanding beyond Europe if it’s realistic and sustainable. Nothing is decided yet, but the interest so far is encouraging. Whatever happens next, the plan is to keep it Bitcoin-only, community-focused, and fun.
Cheers, and happy stacking sats with your beer.
– Altan
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