Bold, strong, intense. You could use those words to describe coffee… you could also use it to describe this electric guitar built by YouTuber and guitar aficionado, Burls Art. Designed as a gift for his friend’s company Copper Coffee, Burls Art’s guitar body is made from a whopping 5,000 roasted coffee beans suspended in epoxy. Modeled in the shape of a Gibson Explorer, the guitar’s body proudly showcases the coffee beans and the unique texture created by grinding their surface smooth. It’s got a beautifully speckled, dark cork-like texture, and even smells like coffee! The fretboard and headstock are built from scratch too, and the entire guitar sports copper accents (for the aesthetics, but also because the company is literally called Copper Coffee), and the Copper Coffee logo is beautifully inlaid into the fretboard. If you check out the end of the video, Burls Art gives the guitar a spin too, and just like a good Macchiato, it gives me goosebumps!
A close-up look at the guitar’s body reveals the coffee-bean texture. If preserved correctly and maintained well, the beans should easily last decades, Burls Art mentioned after doing a bit of research. The guitar’s body doesn’t just encase the coffee beans in an epoxy outer container. You can see how the coffee-bean cross-sections are visible on the entire surface. The casting process resulted in a fair amount of air bubbles which Burls Art filled with copper epoxy before finishing smooth with a sanding machine and buffing with a coat of polish. The result really speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
The guitar’s body is fitted with two double-coil pickups and aged copper knobs and hardware. The fretboard sports the Copper Coffee logo inlaid into the wood, using a mixture of copper-colored epoxy and silica powder. The headstock, on the other hand, has an actual copper sheeting that’s been fused to the wood before being polished and adorned with the Burls Art logo.
The back of the fretboard reveals an incredible striped pattern almost comparable to snakewood. A closer look at the headstock and fretboard reveals the guitar’s finer details.
It’s unclear how much time it took for Burls Art to make the guitar from scratch, but the YouTube video really details the entire process out from scratch. It starts with pouring the 5,000 coffee beans into a cast and topping it off with epoxy. Ince cured, Burls Art cuts out the basic shape using a large jigsaw machine before using different tools to define the guitar’s shape and smoothen its surface. The fretboard and headstock were built entirely from scratch too, along with the electricals being routed through the guitar’s main body. Burls Art mentions that the body has a pretty distinct coffee smell (which would have been masked if he had coated the body entirely with epoxy), and that his studio smelled like coffee all through the construction process! The coffee guitar now proudly hangs at the Copper Coffee head office in Austin Texas.
Designer: Burls Art
