Ska Brewing has a great concept for raising support for charities you should steal (the brewhouse helped donate $28,000 for fire relief funds)

Craft breweries giving to charity isn’t a newsflash because so many of them do it, but Durango, Colo.’s Ska Brewing stands out for its Token Tuesdays concept (launched in December 2017). Every Tuesday at Ska Brewing, customers receive a token for each beer they buy. Customers then take those tokens and donate them (each token = $1), choosing between one of two charities selected for that day. At the end of the month, Ska will write a check to those organizations.

Donations from beer sales are always great, but the addition of choice — letting a customer actively choose where their donation goes — is a great little tweak. A really cool concept to give a random Tuesday at a bar a little more meaning.

This month’s receipients of Token Tuesday checks were Durango’s Community Emergency Relief Fund (CERF) and the Durango Food Bank, which keeps the momentum going in the brewery’s support for fire relief efforts in Durango. This all started with Save The San Juans Saturday, an event initiated by Ska Brewing, The Colorado Brewers Guild, more than 25 brewing companies and local bars and restaurants. Breweries that participated in the Save The San Juans Saturday fundraiser for Fire 416 relief raised more than $28,000 for Durango’s Community Emergency Relief Fund (CERF).

A message we can all get behind.

“With 50 percent of the fire contained, evacuees [including some Ska employees] have returned to their homes and the National Forest is open again— but it’s not exactly business as usual,” said Ska Brewing Founder Dave Thibodeau. “Now more than ever it’s an important time to spend tourism dollars in Durango. We’ll be here with cold beer when you arrive.”

Heres’ the full list of breweries that participated in Save the San Juans: