They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Well, for Josh Stolberg, your beer bottles caps that you toss into the garbage each time you crack open a cold one are his.
They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Well, for Josh Stolberg, your beer bottles caps that you toss into the garbage each time you crack open a cold one are his.
Stolberg is the founder and crafter behind Capworks, a local business that takes beer bottle caps and fuses them together to make everything from flowers, to wings, to hockey players to motorcycle riders.
He launched CapWorks three years ago out of a hobby.
“I made some holiday presents they were just plants and some friends of mine had a food cart at the time and asked me to make stuff for them to sell,” Stolberg said.
He first made some flowers out of beer caps for a food cart called Super Fresh and about two and a half years ago, started selling at South of the James Farmers Market at a tent he shared with the food truck.
By the end of that summer, the avid beer-bottle collector got a table at farmers market.
The 30-year-old VCU graduate works full time as an engineer for Alstom and got the idea for the business after looking at an ever-growing heap of bottle caps in his house.
“I just had a ton of caps around I’ve got bucket in the corner of the living room and not going to anything with it so I figured I try and do something with it,” he said.
He made the costume in the photo above about five years ago for Halloween.
“I was walking around Belle Isle and thought maybe I should use all my caps for something for Halloween this year,” he said. “It’s about 17 pounds.”
He makes mostly small items such as flowers, animals, but has also made larger items like big expanded wings and signs for businesses. His cap art runs about $8-$20 and the most expensive piece he’s done has been about $600.
“I make these little roses, refrigerator magnet stars and I started making coasters at the end of last year and that’s been the most popular thing,” he said.
Stolberg said he had a booth at the National Beer Expo that was recently held at the Richmond Convention Center and his coasters sold really well.
“We sold out of them,” he said. “That was the first time we’d done more than just a single brewery.”
The avid-beer drinker and collector mainly sells to breweries. He’s done pieces for Ardent, Hardywood and Strangeways.
Strangeways has a couple of his bigger pieces.
“One of them is up at the bar is the “S” that’s on their bottle caps with the lightning bolt and the one at the end of the hall says “Taste the Local” that’s all Richmond surrounding area caps.”
He made a T-Rex for Hardywood called “Hardysauras” out the brewery’s Singel beer bottle caps.
For the smaller items, Stolberg said it can take about half an hour to an hour to construct and the more intricate stuff can take several hours or more.
“The T-Rex took 20 hours,” he said. “The costume took several months.”
He builds these beer cap pieces of artwork out of a spare bedroom in his house and he’s recruited his wife to help out, because as you can imagine there’s lots of sorting to do.
“I might have 100,000,” he said. “They’re all organized in bins in various sizes. We have a two-person Jacuzzi tub that we never use and I ran out of places to put the unsorted caps so all the caps just went in the tub until we had time to sort them.”
And although it would be beyond impressive, Stolberg isn’t drinking all those beers himself to get those bottle caps.
“{I get} Lots of donations I set up at the market and people see me there every week and bring me their bags of caps,” he said. “All the local breweries have been very generous.”
Lickinghole Creek Brewery gave him a couple thousand a few months ago, Strangeways has given thousands, along with Hadywood.
“I’ve got so many from Hardywood I’ll doubt I’ll ever need to ask them for caps again,” he said. “They gave me a tub of their Singel caps and then I got some of their silver and green ones for a project recently.”
His buyers are mostly beer drinkers that buy the smaller items, but Stolberg said he’s looking to get his work into art shows, more breweries, and galleries and beer shows this year.
He also plans to start investing in some more equipment for CapWorks soon and eventually take the business full time.
