7 Cuz Beer Store collaborates with LVC and Lancaster brewery in new series

A recent collaboration is bringing together beer lovers, college students, and art fanatics, all while pouring back into the Lebanon County community.

Seven Cuz Beer Store is featuring four Lebanon Valley College students’ art on beer store-exclusive cans brewed by Lancaster’s Spring House Brewing.

Brian Musser, one of seven cousin owners of Seven Cuz Beer Store, told LebTown they were searching for a local brewery to collaborate with on store-exclusive cans, having had a not-so-smooth collaboration with a local brewery in the past.

The cousins asked store manager Jeremy Miller to discuss the possibility of collaborating on a store-exclusive can with brewery representatives when they visited the beer store.

Miller asked Joe Armstrong, director of sales for Lancaster’s Spring House Brewing, last fall, “and I said, ‘Well, let’s talk because we do these kind of things,'” Armstrong told LebTown. “We’re very able and apt to work on these specialty projects.”

As part of their conversations about the store-exclusive cans, Armstrong worked with the cousins to identify four kinds of beer the brewery would be successful in making and the store would be successful in selling.

When it came to the can designs, Armstrong mentioned the brewery’s Limited Artist Collaboration Series, through which a new kind of beer is released each month featuring a visual artist’s work on the can.

Lancaster’s Spring House Brewing develops contacts with these artists, whose work is voted on out of the best of around 1,500 annual submissions, and revisits these contacts when searching for local artists to work with while collaborating with local businesses.

However, the brewery did not have any Lebanon-based artists while collaborating with Seven Cuz Beer Store, so Armstrong suggested reaching out to LVC. “And I said, I’m all for it,” Musser told LebTown. This was when Dr. Grant Taylor, professor of art and art history and director of creative arts at LVC, got involved.

“They reached out to me, and I said, ‘Yeah, we have got obviously an art degree where students produce really extraordinary work,'” Taylor told LebTown. He said his experience teaching various art courses, including graphic design, helped him identify art that would look good on cans.

Taylor created mock-ups of art that came out of Printmaking Studio — four relief printing and four screen printing — and another four mock-ups of art that came out of Creative Wellness Studio, and sent them to the brewery and beer store for review.

“In the end, they really liked the abstract, striped designs,” Taylor said, “and I was happy with that because I thought they were really interesting as well, rather than just go for an everyday beer design.”

The selected artwork was originally created for a project titled “Body as Emotional Landscape” in Creative Wellness Studio, which is an art therapy course offered to art majors and non-art majors alike by the college.

For the project, students were asked to create an abstract self-portrait using oil pastels and represent their physical, mental, and emotional states through bands of varying thickness, colors, and textures. This resulted in abstract compositions resembling barcodes.

Taylor said he selected the pieces based on aesthetics, specifically, the pieces that worked well for each of the four seasonal releases and worked well together for the series. He changed the orientation of the stripes from horizontal to vertical to lean into the pieces’ barcode resemblance.

“I just really appreciate the collaboration work with LVC and Spring House. Joe is a big part of that,” Musser said. “And so, just excited to be in Lebanon as always, and we love serving our community.”

The beer store makes one order of each kind of beer in hopes that it sells out before the next beer is released in the series. The beer is available on a first-come, first-served basis while supplies last. “The end goal is not to have stuff sitting around on the shelf,” Armstrong added.

During each release period, locals can view the display at the front of the beer store, which features an image of the student and their artwork, including the original piece used in the can design.

Released in April as the first beer store-exclusive can in the series was Puddle Jumper, based on art by Braden Bohannon, an athletic training major set to graduate in 2025.

To be released in June is Summer Daze (west coast IPA), based on art by Natalie Moore, an arts major set to graduate in 2028.

To be released in August is Pappy’s Pale Lager, named in honor of the cousins’ grandfather, Abner Musser II, and based on art by Kayla Irizarry, an arts major who is transferring to Rowan University in New Jersey and is set to graduate in 2028.

To be released in November as the last can in the series is Fallin’ Down IPA (hazy IPA), based on art by Courtney Smith, an arts major who earned her bachelor’s in 2024 and is set to graduate with a master’s in 2025.

“At the end of the year, what we’ll do is we’ll take a portion of those sales, and our goal is to push that back into the community in a way,” Musser told LebTown. “For me personally, it’s kind of a full circle on the importance of small business because you have two collaborating businesses and then you’re able to include in there the college.”

Musser said if the collaboration is well-received by the local community, the beer store will release another series of four beer store-exclusive cans brewed locally based on art by local artists and go from there.