A beer mat has a short, hard life. It gets put down, rained on by a pint, picked at, flicked across the table, and binned at closing time. Almost nobody has ever thought of one as a piece of design, which is a shame, because it's a very good one: about ten centimetres of card, two sides, and one job to do before the glass lands on top of it.
A lid that ended up underneath
The German word for a beer mat is Bierdeckel, which literally means "beer lid", and the name makes more sense once you know where it started. In the nineteenth century, wealthier drinkers had tankards with tin or silver lids, while everyone else made do with plain mugs. Felt pads were used outdoors, laid on top of a mug to keep leaves and insects out of the beer. The pad eventually moved from the top of the glass to the bottom, and the name stayed exactly where it was.
Cardboard first, then pulp
Printed beer mats arrived in the 1880s. From around 1880, the printer Friedrich Horn, working in Buckau near Magdeburg, was punching coasters out of cardboard and printing motifs onto them. They didn't cope well with actual beer, and in 1892 Robert Sputh of Dresden came up with a better answer: wood pulp poured into round moulds and dried, which soaked up spills far more willingly than flat card. That absorbent pulp board is still the basic recipe today.
Once the mat could survive a pint, brewers noticed it was also a very small billboard. By the early 1900s they were printing their names on them, often in a single colour of ink, because there was no point paying for more on something that might be damp within the minute.
Crossing to Britain
Beer mats are usually dated in Britain to the early 1920s, with Watney, Combe, Reid & Co. most often credited as the first brewery to put its name on one, though the exact date is argued over. They became properly common in the 1950s, when national brands started competing for the same pub tables.
It's a brief that suits a designer. The mat has to be read at arm's length in dim light, probably with a hand over half of it, and the whole thing is round or square-cornered and roughly 94mm across. There's room for a name, a logo and one good idea, and not much else. The best of them manage all three, and the worst still have a lovely stain on them by the end of the night.
The people who kept them
Collecting beer mats got its own name, tegestology, from the Latin for "tile", and by the 1950s British newspapers were already reporting on the new hobby. The serious end of it is remarkable: Guinness World Records lists Leo Pisker of Austria with 152,860 coasters from 192 countries.
The design end is catching up too. Illustrator and graphic designer Adam Kimberley started collecting vintage English pub mats as a child and has gathered over 500 on his @beerstainedpulp Instagram account, which became a book, Beer Stained Pulp, published by Unicorn. Flick through it and it turns out an awful lot of Britain's pub history was drawn at roughly the size of a saucer.
Worth pocketing
We'll admit the beer mats on our Beer Mats card are the ones we'd have quietly pocketed ourselves, so it means a great deal that some of our beer mat designs are featured in the November issue of Simple Things magazine. We're very proud of that, and a little amazed that something drawn at roughly the size of a saucer has made it onto the page.
If you'd rather have them closer to home, there's a bigger version of the same collection in the limited-edition giclee print, for a wall rather than a coat pocket.
One last detail we like, for what it's worth: the story goes that in Czech pubs the beer keeps arriving until you put your mat on top of your glass. So the lid, in the end, did get its job back.
