(Courtesy Sierra Nevada Brewing)

You may not know it (we didn’t) but keg tossing is a thing. It’s a staple of international strongman competitions, and there are record-breaking keg-hurlers who are world renowned.

So to celebrate the release of Big Little Thing Imperial IPA, the brewery’s newest year-round, Sierra Nevada Brewing went BIG and attempted to break the Guinness World Record for the farthest distance thrown by a trebuchet (a type of catapult that uses a counterweight to send things flying). And in this case that thing was a full keg which weighed more than 44lbs.

“Big Little Thing is a big beer and we wanted to launch it in a big way,” said Brand Manager, Jourdan Reinhart. “What’s bigger than a GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS® Title?”

On March 2, Sierra Nevada set up its specially branded catapult in the brewery’s hop yard, complete with 6,000 lb. counterweight, and broke the world record for distance, successfully hurling a full keg an impressive 438.81 feet, easily surpassing the previous record of 253 feet and winning the Guinness World Record title.

“Usually we’d launch a beer through sampling events, music festivals, and more, but that obviously wasn’t possible this year,” Robin Gregory, Sierra Nevada’s communications director, told Food & Wine. “Watching those kegs fly across the field was a really fun way to celebrate the launch of Big Little Thing, and we’re excited to now hold a Guinness World Records title.”

And no, the kegs used to break that record weren’t actually full of Sierra Nevada’s new 9% ABV Imperial IPA.

“They are not full of any beer,” said Terence Sullivan, brand manager and official lever-puller for the trebuchet, told KHSL-TL. “We didn’t want to sacrifice any beer. Beer is for drinking so we loaded them up with water.”

But American Craft Beer Editor-In-Chief Tom Bobak is of the mind that perhaps the brewery should have. “Craft breweries always seem to benefit from offering special beer variations. So why not an Imperial IPA that went the distance?”