What to do with beer caps: 8 DIY and decor ideas

There's always that jar somewhere, filling itself up. Throwing the caps out feels wasteful; keeping them achieves nothing until you do something with them. Here's what you can genuinely do with beer bottle caps: the prep step everyone skips, eight ideas that hold up, and the truth about recycling them.

What can you do with beer bottle caps?

Three routes: turn them into something you use (coasters, magnets, a tabletop), collect them if you like the artwork, or recycle them with your metals. The most common mistake is skipping preparation — a badly cleaned cap stays tacky, smells of sugar, and eventually rusts.

How should you prepare caps before crafting?

Five minutes of prep saves hours of disappointment. Leftover beer is sugary: it attracts dust and leaves a sticky film across everything you build.

1. 1Rinse them in hot water at the end of the night, before anything dries on.
2. 2Soak them for an hour in soapy water to lift the rest.
3. 3Dry them completely, laid flat in open air — trapped moisture is what rusts the steel.
4. 4Sort them: nicely round ones on one side, bent ones on the other (they're fine for projects where you flatten them).

One tip: caps mangled by a standard opener look rough. If you want clean caps for a display project, open your bottles with as little bending as possible — a few methods are covered in how to open a beer without an opener.

8 DIY and decor ideas using bottle caps

1. Coasters

The classic, and the most useful. Arrange the caps in a round mould, pour resin, let it cure. Budget around thirty caps for a set of four. It's the ideal starter project: little equipment, and something usable straight away.

2. A trivet

Same idea, scaled up on a wooden base. Caps handle the heat of a casserole dish easily, and the mosaic effect always earns a comment on the table.

3. Fridge magnets

The fastest project going: a flat magnet glued to the back and you're done. Perfect for caps whose artwork you actually like — local breweries, limited runs, holiday souvenirs.

4. Wall art or a map

Draw a shape on a wooden panel — a letter, a map of your region, a logo — then fill it with caps. It takes time, but it's the project with the biggest impact on a wall. Expect to need several hundred caps for an A3 size.

5. A tabletop

The next level up: cover a whole tabletop, then flood it with thick resin. The result is striking and close to indestructible. For patient people only — it needs a lot of caps and a perfectly flat surface.

6. Keyrings and small jewellery

One cap, one drill hole, one ring. You can also hammer them flat for a rougher look. Lovely as a memento from a brewery you visited together.

7. A garland or a curtain

Pierced and threaded onto fishing line, caps make a decoration that chimes nicely. Very effective for dressing a bar corner, a terrace, or a themed night like a homemade Oktoberfest.

8. An aperitif game

Noughts and crosses, shove-ha'penny, throwing games: caps make excellent counters. Two different brewery designs are enough to tell the players apart. A neat addition to your aperitif games with friends.

How do you collect caps without losing them?

The real obstacle is collection: the cap drops, rolls under the furniture, and nobody picks it up. The habit that fixes it is choosing one container — a jar sitting next to the opener — and never deviating from it.

There's also the fun method: with a beer mortar, the cap is launched upward instead of falling to the floor. Aim at the same spot and it lands in the same place every time, which turns collecting into a game. The principle is explained in how it works.

Are beer bottle caps recyclable?

Yes: a beer cap is made of steel, a metal that is recycled and separated magnetically at sorting centres. It belongs with metal packaging in your recycling bin rather than in general waste.

• Yellow bin: a cap is small metal packaging and goes in with metal packaging; whether loose or grouped depends on your local sorting rules.
• Check your local rules: sorting instructions still vary from one council to the next.

And if the object itself intrigues you, its backstory is worth a detour: the crown cap is over a century old, and we tell that story in the history of the beer cap.

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