Carlsberg has always used the finest barley, hops and yeast to make its world famous lager. But in recent years, quality has become something most people associate with hand-brewed craft beer. We needed to find a way to make the story of Carlsberg's high grade ingredients famous again.

As we researched the subject, we found that Carlsberg’s main ingredients – barley, hops and yeast - have some rather unexpected properties. We learned that they contain lots of vitamin B and sillicum, both of which have beautifying properties for hair and skin. We also launched research that suggested that a lot of men would feel more comfortable buying beauty products from a manly brand like Carlsberg. Based on those insights, we decided to break into an industry obsessed with quality ingredients: The beauty industry.

In collaboration with Carlsberg Laboratory, we made experiments on how to extract the barley, hops and yeast from the Carlsberg Larger beer in order to use them in beauty products. We found out that by freeze-drying the beer into beer powder we could preserve all the beneficial ingredients, making it perfect for beauty product production. We took the beer powder to the organic cosmetics producer Urtegaarden, and together with the company’s product development team, we created the Carlsberg Beer Beauty Series – a range of male grooming products each containing 0.5 liters of real Carlsberg lager beer.

The entire production process was documented through a short-film, which was used as part of a PR-kit containing a press release, still-images of the series and video footage. The campaign was launched through PR outreach to global trending, news, lifestyle, beer and football media. These efforts were combined with social media competitions, seeding of the beauty products to key influencers and a Carlsberg.com landing page outlining the project and featuring the short-film.

Major newspapers and TV-channels from all over the world picked up the story and millions of social shares made the story spread worldwide. The Carlsberg Beer Beauty Series for Men got people all over the world to start talking about the quality and craft of Carlsberg once again. With a calculated 852 million media impressions, and more than 8.000 tracked media publications (Paper, TV, online) the message travelled the world, covering all of Carlsberg’s markets. For the first time ever, Carlsberg had realized its strategic communication platform “If Carlsberg did…” with an actual product launch. The series sold out within a week, and is now produced in larger scales to be sold in retail stores. It seems that people are more than happy to pay EUR 60 a series to engage with the Carlsberg message of the quality of its barley, hops and yeast! Please shower responsibly.

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