The San Francisco to Great Bear Lake Canal

Fake map · 2019 · Golden age of canal travel

TLDR

This map imagines a canal running 2,831 miles from San Francisco to the far reaches of northern Canada, complete with a comprehensive system of impossible canal locks.

Juicy details

The thing about this map is that it's actually quite accurate, assuming it was actually possible to dig a canal flowing from San Francisco to Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada. I spent way too many hours tracing the hypothetically best route to build a canal through the mountains and calculated the number of locks that it would take to raise and lower the canal accordingly.

This map was created as part of the Bean Brew No.8 experience and distributed to the first actual paying customers of Bean Brew. One fun additional challenge was the customer (an IDEO colleague) who drank his beer while traveling in Iceland, which of course had to be visualized on the map.

Format

Format: Silk Screen
Size: 18" by 24"

Prints available

Silk Screen · 18" by 24"

Zoomed details

This map of locks and tunnels along the route might be my crowning achievement as a fictional cartographer

The majority of beer was consumed in one of two area locations

The San Francisco cohort of beer drinkers

This fictional route is actually quite accurate

The Bean Brew story

Bean Brew came about as a home brewing project transformed into a mapping project. It worked like this:

I would brew a batch of beer (generally a Saison) into about 16 large format bottles.
Every batch had a theme, which was almost always ridiculous, but just plausible enough to maybe be true? Accompanying this theme was a survey, which at first actually asked people about their Bean Brew beer drinking experience. However, these questions quickly went rogue.
The 16 bottles of beer were given away at first. In later years they were actually sold in highly exclusive batches. The beer was drunk. Usually without too much hounding, every person who obtained a bottle returned their survey results to Bean Brew HQ.
I analyzed these results with the help of my slide rule, then designed a map visualizing the Bean Brew experience.
The Bean Brew designs were then dispatched to Texas, where my friend Rand used his mad crazy printmaking skills to transform them into four-color silkscreens. Rand was always very busy (or falling off of ladders) and the silkscreening process generally took many months to complete.
On a happy day many months after the original beers were consumed, every person who participated in the experience received a beautiful map.

Purchase a print