There’s a six-foot bottle of LIONBERRY REGENERATIVE HYDRATION on its way to Kansas from Canada. It used to be a water heater.
Dave — the artist behind Theeupcycler Metal Art, based in Wetaskiwin, Alberta — takes things the world throws away and gives them a second life. Old water heaters. Car parts. Scrap steel. With a torch, an eye, and a deep respect for what a discarded object can still become, he turns industrial cast-offs into art.
When Dave looked at a six-foot water heater, he saw a bottle. Our bottle. He cut the LIONBERRY logo straight into the steel — the lion, the one — and set a purple light inside. At night, the whole thing glows elderberry. A hand-cut, fire-and-steel LIONBERRY bottle, lit from within, born from something that was headed for the scrap pile.
It’s shipping down from Alberta this summer to help us welcome the world. With the World Cup bringing visitors from every corner of the planet to the heartland, we wanted something that told the LIONBERRY story without saying a word: farm-rooted, clean-label, nothing wasted, nothing synthetic, everything given a second life. An upcycled bottle for a regenerative brand. It fits.
Dave’s work is about honoring what already exists — the steel, the shape, the history of the object — and coaxing something new out of it. That’s the same ethic behind LIONBERRY. We don’t formulate in a lab. We grow, press, and bottle what the land already offers, and we try to waste none of it. Elderberries the birds didn’t get. Honey from hives down the road. Lion’s mane from a Missouri mushroom farm. Butterfly pea flower for the color the earth already knows how to make.
A water heater reborn as a glowing elderberry bottle is, maybe, the most honest piece of brand art we could have asked for. Thank you, Dave. We can’t wait to stand next to it this summer as we welcome the WORLDS CUP AND FIFA TO KANSAS CITY and watch people’s faces when they realize what it used to be!
