Arts & crafts; the story of our small batch artwork
Beady eyed beer connoisseurs will have noticed a few new styles on some of our small batch beer labels lately, so we thought we'd give you the skinny on some of the inky contributors we've had working on our artwork.
Our small batch beers are limited edition, weird and wonderful beers. Beers that possess a certain intensity. A strangeness. A bizarre twist and a beautiful uniqueness. If you're looking for a run of the mill IPA, you've come to the wrong party. This is a do for mad hatters and maniacs.
And so, to aptly embody the character and personality of these brazen jokers and madmen, we seek to employ the steady hand of a (preferably unsteady) mind. Enter, the illustrators.
Take, for example, Everyday Anarchy. For this beer, we needed a design as unhinged and contradictory as the beer and its very name. An imperial saison aged in french white wine barrels, it spun a web of strange, sophisticated alcohol aromas alongside fruity, zippy, sherry and plum. It was glorious insanity bottled, and when we saw artist Ben Rider's back catalogue, we knew he was the man for the job.
Black Jacques was in some ways the estranged twin of Everyday Anarchy. The negative copy of it's brother, this beer is an imperial black saison aged in red wine barrels. It's a twisted, complex, card-counting fiend. At once scary and strange, sumptuous and striking. Serge Seidlitz was undoubtedly our man here, and his character portrayal of the weird, slightly insane creature that Black Jacques represented summed up the flavours with squiggles and lines.
Looking back to early this year, we launched Dead Metaphor - our collaborative brew with two of the country's best beer bloggers; Rob from HopZine and Rich from The Beer Cast. The beer they brewed with us was a coffee and chocolate breakfast stout, intended to awaken the senses and get the literary cogs whirring. The designer destined for this was the inimitable Drew Millward. With sleep-deprived eyes, a steaming cuppa joe and a clock fast approaching the dreaded 5pm deadline, the artwork cleverly encapsulated the caffeine-fuelled, oaty, deep, dark depths within the bottle it adorned.
For Russian Doll, (which will be released next month), we wanted something that appeared to hail from a dark spin on a Russian folk tale. Esther McManus' evocative take on fairy tales and folklore encapsulates the on-edge eeriness of giants, wolves, gingerbread houses and splintered dreams. Look out for this series of four beers of differing ABVs in the coming weeks!
Got an oddball illustrator you reckon we should take for afternoon tea?
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