Swedish Students Just 3D-Printed a Beer Bottle the Size of a Sesame Seed

Back in October, Carlsberg made waves by unveiling the world’s smallest beer bottle, a 12-millimetre glass vessel filled with a single drop of non-alcoholic beer.

It was cute, absurd, and made for a great talking point about responsible drinking.

It lasted about five months.

A team of five students from Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology just obliterated that record with a 3D-printed Carlsberg bottle that stands just four millimetres tall, roughly the size of a sesame seed.

It holds a whopping 0.00001057 centiliters of alcohol-free beer. To put that in perspective, you’d need about 5.37 million of these bottles to fill a single pint.

The team includes Joel Bovin, Annie Nordström, Lucas Bergman, Linnea Isaksson, and Karin Hallgren, started with a digital 3D model of the classic 33 cl Carlsberg bottle and pushed a high-precision 3D printer to its absolute limits. Four millimetres turned out to be the threshold.

After cleaning the inside with a microcannula and curing it under UV light, miniature artist Åsa Strand stepped in to handle the cap, label, filling, and coloring.

The whole thing started as a challenge Carlsberg issued to university students alongside the original record launch, with 10,000 SEK and a trip to the Carlsberg Research Laboratory in Copenhagen on the line. Not a bad prize for making something almost too small to see.

The most moderate beer ever made, and somehow, a pretty compelling conversation starter.