Referencing the infamous Cuyahoga River fire of 1969, the revamped image for Burning River Pale Ale took inspiration from recycled materials to help symbolize Burning River’s environmental message, and incorporates newspaper clippings from the fire and text from the 1972 Clean Water Act.
Most breweries don’t release their first packaged beer with a label depicting their hometown getting sucked into a void of nothingness. In the image, a classic New York street corner—historic brownstone, sign-studded street lamp and all—is flying into a vacuum.
Hop, Drop ‘N Roll’s minimalist can design tells you what to expect from that first sip. The touch of yellow alludes to citrus, and the sleek classic car suggests a smooth body. That subtle artistry sets NoDa’s cans apart, and also reflects the brewery’s origins in the bohemian enclave of NoDa, in Charlotte, N.C.
All of that Scoville imagery on the label serves as a semi-serious warning of the insane heat level in Twisted Pine’s Ghost Face Killah, the world’s spiciest beer.
The Craft Beer Flight Kit was inspired by Advent calendars Ryan Sauder and Steve Denlinger made for friends in 2013, which revealed a beer a day for the 24 days before Christmas.
Easily assembled without tools or glue by snapping the pieces together, the PuzzlePax also can be disassembled for flat storage, making it perfect for keeping in a car or messenger bag when heading to the local bottle shop.
For anyone familiar with craft beer brands, the name Fullsteam instantly conjures a visual of the brewery’s logo, the chunky font with that enigmatic backwards “F.”
When a beer is labeled “best by,” the brewery makes a judgment weighing freshness against shelf life, and, presumably, the brewery’s bottom line. With “bottled on” dates, buyers must decide for themselves.
The Julian system is but one of many tricks that craft brewers employ to confuse unsuspecting consumers into buying old and often lifeless beer. Lacking in simple clarity, it requires customers to come equipped with additional computational skills just to find a relatively fresh bottle.
Adroit Theory’s aesthetic leans dark—think a little bit of goth, a little bit of motorcycle club and a whole lot of rock ‘n’ roll. You can see it in the label of its first beer, B/A/Y/S.
Church of The Atom is a nanobrewery in Sweden’s beer hub of Gothenburg that derives its name from a post-apocalyptic video game that co-founders Kristian Hallberg and Marcus Ekdahl were both into when they decided to launch CoTA.
For many breweries, canning is easier said than done. Much like a mobile bottling line, mobile canning lines provide all the necessary equipment, supplies and know-how, so brewers can focus on what they do best: brewing.
Spiteful, a small brewery in Chicago, is run by a couple of really nice guys who really hate certain things. Among the triggers of their wrath have been trouble-making pigeons, a guy named Colin and texting pedestrians.
At London’s Partizan Brewing, each label starts with the same idea—characters and objects shaping letters that spell the name of the beer, a technique that’s been part of artist Alec Doherty’s work for a while.
With over 2,100 breweries currently operating in the US and more than half that in the planning stages, the craft beer market’s ability to absorb a rapid growth in stock-keeping-units is uncertain.
Just like there is no typical craft beer, there seems to be no typical craft logo. And with the ongoing proliferation of craft breweries in the US, branding is becoming both more crucial and more impressive than ever before.
Both bottle carrier designs allow you to walk into your favorite bottle shop, brewery or tap house with a sturdy, reusable holder, so you can bring your beers home or to any event in classic style and without worrying about them dropping out of flimsy cardboard cartons.
Labels typically have been where most of the creativity has gone, but a Houston man has just made it a lot easier for brewers to make their mark, literally, with customized, digitally printed bottle caps.
Some great beers unfortunately get tagged with horrid labels—ranging from boring to sophomoric, to sexist—while mediocre beers get wrapped in a packaging tale that’s much more interesting than the beer.
Switching from the once-ubiquitous brown bottles to cans may have been novel nine years ago, but today, it’s just one way craft brewers are reexamining their relationship with the container industry in hopes of shaving costs and putting better beer on the shelves.
Over the years, brewers have come up with four basic types of packaging—casks, bottles, kegs and cans. Each type of package protects beer in different ways, and can cause the beer to taste quite different.
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