Recently ABW was proud to sponsor the 2009 Community Cup. We sponsored the event in 2007 but last year the event was in hiatus.

This year the event was ran by Reclink and was held at Elsternwick park. It was a cold windy day but well worth it to finally see the Espy Rockdogs over throw the damn Megahertz.

Best of all over $120,000 was raised to support to ongoing work of Reclink

We will be sponsoring the Good Food and Wine Show this weekend hopefully contributing a little sobriety to the beer and wine areas. We will also have a stand at the show so come along and say G’day.

We will be keeping an eye out for Gordon Ramsey who is the head attraction this year. Maybe if we see him we should go up and tell him to ‘Go Fu#&K himself’. He has properly been waiting years for someone to say that to him.

Instead of giving away water this year we thought we would ask for a gold coin donation and give all profits to the Red Cross who are always out there doing great work with those not as fortunate as us.

Hope to see you there

We are proud to be sponsors of this years Cherry Rock Festival headlined by The Datsuns. It is being held at AC/DC lane in Melbourne this Sunday. If you haven’t got tickets already I suggest you hop to it as there are only 500 on offer.

See you there with your bells.

We donated some water to the Yea Autumn Festival today. It was a great day out and it was great to see a community letting their hair down and having a boogie to Spiderbait and Little Red.

It was worth it just for the drive up there. Driving through forests of charcoal trees was mesmerising. The road to King Lake was blocked off but we had no interest in seeing too much. Seeing the Glenburn pub burnt to the ground was enough for my wife and I. We had only had a beer in there about 6 months ago.

Apparently the Yea festival was almost called off because of the fires. But the good folks from the Melbourne Festival stepped in to make sure the event went ahead. If you live in Melbourne and you missed this event, make sure you get up to these areas soon and put a bit of cash into the community.

Our hearts go out to all those affected by the bush fires in Victoria this week. Our initial fears were loss of production when our own facilities were momentarily under threat, all that quickly became insignificant when news of lost lives started to come in. Not much else to say really. We are having our own meeting today to discuss how we can contribute as a business and as individuals. We encourage you all to do the same. Start by visiting this page put together by the ABC.

We love to see good use of empty plastic bottles here at ABW. Here is some seriously nice lighting design from Manchester based designer Michelle Brand. “Once a plastic drinks bottle is empty, it is perceived as redundant and then thrown away. I wanted to challenge this wasteful paradigm.”

Michelle’s intention is develop the design to appeal to the retail and interior design market.

Thanks to inhabitat

Our distributors around Australia do an amazing job. Especially at this time of the year when the weather heats up and sales sky rocket. There they are at the crack of dawn loading up the trucks and hitting the road to fulfill the orders from the retailers.

We always appreciate their efforts and we are certainly glad the video above doesn’t involve any of them!

Bit of a late posting. A couple of weeks ago we provided some product to the launch of swanky new fashion store BODY. Some great clothing (which made my partner weak at the knees) by Australian designer dainy sawatzky and an awesome shop fit out.

Where is it you ask?

Prahran? Surry Hills? West End?

Nope actually Healsville thank you very much!

On Saturday we sponsored a walk in Melbourne as part of the World’s Biggest Walk. The aim of the walk is to raise awareness for organ donation and transplantation. It is hard to understand why Australia has one of the lowest organ donation rates in the developed world. I mean really what are you planning to do with them when you are gone.

It is also well know that even though most people believe in organ and tissue donation, family refusal rates are 40-50% at the intensive care bedside. So make sure you tell your family that your cool with it.

Every year just before christmas, Evian bring out a bottle that is designed by some flouncy European designer with a fancy name. This time it is Jean-Paul Gaultier the perfume dude. Damn I wish I had a name like that oh how the ladies would swoon.

Anyway I love the description of the new Evian bottle from the website:

here youth, heart and spirit find their source…

To be appreciated alone or as a pair, these playful and lively objects emphasise the clearness of the meeting between the designer and his source of inspiration, Evian natural mineral water.

The simplest expression of timeless what-the-fuck??? I hope Jean-paul doesn’t come around here waving his wanton talent.

I mean the bottle looks cool and everything BUT FOR FUCK SAKE PEOPLE IT’S JUST WATER!!!