Royal Caribbean's exclusive brand of beer made its debut today at Perfect Day at CocoCay.

Guests sailing on Symphony of the Seas had the opportunity to be the first to sample the, "Chilla Thrilla" beer at the cruise line's private island destination.

Photo by Elise Jackson

Photo by Vicki Sheppard

The beer is a collaboration between Royal Caribbean and Funky Buddha Brewery, which we first reported on last month.

Chilla Thrilla will be available at Perfect Day at CocoCay for guests to enjoy.

Royal Caribbean is using a brand new beer keg that is great for the environment and offers better tasting beer too!

Royal Caribbean and Heineken Global Duty Free developed a 100% recyclable beer keg known as BrewLock.

The BrewLock keg holds beer in a collapsible plastic sac inside a hard-shell plastic container. Pressurized air inside the shell squeezes the sac, forces the beer into a hose and on to the tap, without air or gases ever touching the beer.

It’s made of PET, the most widely recycled plastic in the world, according to The National Association for PET Container Resources.

The BrewLock can be completely recycled and can be reused to make new bottles, fiberfill for winter coats, certain auto parts and a wide range of other items.

One big advantage of the BrewLock is the keg serves nearly all the product and leaves far less wasted suds behind that are found in traditional kegs.

Royal Caribbean Vice President of Safety and Environmental Stewardship, Rich Pruitt, is a big fan of the new innovation, "From our side, any kind of recyclable materials that can be compacted and stored easily and then recycled versus shipping stuff around the world, from a carbon reduction concept is a good idea.  Plus, if we don’t have these big (metal) kegs on board that are empty and we’re hanging onto them for awhile, it allows us more storage space for other things."

Besides freeing up precious space on a cruise ship by off-loading the compacted plastic kegs in ports with appropriate recycling facilities, the BrewLock further reduces Royal Caribbean's carbon footprint in another way.

In a blog post by Royal Caribbean CEO Adam Goldstein, two announcements were made that were direct results of passenger feedback.

First up was the request by Royal Caribbean fans for more Panama Canal cruises. Goldstein announced that Vision of the Seas was slated to originally offer Caribbean cruises will instead sail a set of Panama Canal cruises in the fall and spring.  The new Panama canal cruises will augment the other long Caribbean sailings already on the books.  

In addition, Goldstein announced that Royal Caribbean will offer gluten-free beer by the end of the year in all of its Irish pubs across the fleet.

Royal Caribbean is building up its selection of beers available on its cruise ships to offer its passengers an even greater variety of choices.

In the past year, Royal Caribbean has been adding new beer choices to the menus of bars and pubs found across its fleet.  Included are small US brewery beers such as a wheat beer from Oregon's Widmer Brothers brewery and an India pale ale from Washington state's Redhook brewery.

Royal Caribbean's director of fleet beverage options BOb Midyette commented on the additions, "We thought we'd define what is state of the art and what is world class (in beer choices) to provide some diversity to our guests."

The new beer menu is available on half of its ships and features more than 40 beer choices, which is up from about 25 a year ago.  The ships featuring this expanded beer selection include all five of its Voyager class ships, its three Freedom class ships and its two new Oasis class ships. Royal Caribbean's newest pub, the Quill & Compass, debuted last year on the recently revamped Radiance of the Seas.