The Difference
Not all beer mats are created equal.
There are numerous online retailers out there selling custom beer mats, but only a very small number of these (including Thirsty's of course) produce the real thing themselves.
What's the difference? Well...
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Specialist Wood-Pulp Board
Our beer mat board is extremely absorbent and can be soaked and dried numerous times without losing its shape or bleeding colours. These are real beer mats the way they've been made for decades.
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Converting a printing press to reliably accept the thick and absorbent beer mat board is a time consuming and costly affair, which is why most traditional printing companies simply won't go there.
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Furthermore, many of the other sellers out there don't actually print on real beer mat board. You could get anything from bog-standard cardboard to two sheets of printed paper glued to a board in the middle.
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Not all beer mats are created equal.
Four Colour Offset-Litho Printing
We have our very own offset-litho printing press. This can produce just about any colour imaginable using the primary CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key/Black) colours. This method allows for a very precise and high quality print.
We also have the ability to use specific Pantone or "spot" colours for absolute precision in colour reproduction.
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Many of the other beer mat sellers out there are actually just re-sellers, and will simply be sending jobs to one of the (very few) real printers such as ourselves. If not, they may be using inferior digital printing techniques and doing it all from their bedroom!
Large Quantities Quickly
The manufacturing techniques we have perfected over the last 15-20 years allow us to process dozens of jobs at a time.
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Most weeks we run the printing press three or four times, and we can vary size of each run to accommodate the exact order volume we have at that time. This means we can accommodate your job quickly, and we can accommodate just about any quantity, large or small.
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Give us a call and let us know what you need and when, and we'll do our absolute best to help.
Artwork Assistance
Unlike many beer mat sellers, we do not expect you to simply upload your design to a faceless website and then wait in hope that they will turn out OK.
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We have our own professional design team that look over every single design and can suggest edits if required. They will provide proofs for you to inspect before we print anything.
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If you need further assistance with the design process we can provide a full design service for a small cost.
Family Owned Business
We are a relatively small, family owned business based in Northampton.
Compared with the other European manufacturers of real beer mats (one in the UK, one in the Netherlands, two in Germany, and excluding all the 'pretenders') we are by far the smallest, but we view this as a huge positive!
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Your business means more to us and we will do our best to help you get the most out of your promotional beer mats.
Friendly, Personal Service
Thirsty's is a real printing business with its own litho-printing press, die-cutting machine and designers.
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We offer a friendly and personal service, and we are more than happy to talk through absolutely anything to do with your beer mats over the phone or via email.
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