Beer, but differently.

 

A small organic beer brewery once turned to us to do a redesign of their beer bottle labels. They wanted to be on the shelves of Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket in the Netherlands and a redesign surely would help.

 

So here’s the problem: large supermarkets only put things on their shelves for which there is sufficient demand. Large brands can create demand through advertising and promotion or they can simply ‘buy’ shelve space, but a small brewery can’t. We therefore thought that operation ‘Albert Heijn’ was not a good idea.

To us it seemed to make more sense to go and find the distinguishing qualities of brand and product to see what opportunities they would bring.
Distinguising qualities were easy to find. The beer was of a high, artisanal and even organic quality, it tasted great and there was a fairly complete range of products available: blonde beer, white beer, special beer, double beer and triple beer.

Small scale production and distribution are relatively expensive which makes a higher price inevitable which in turn means that the brand should be positioned higher up in the market and together with said artisanal quality one naturally arrives at an exclusive, almost classy beer brand and the most natural habitat for such a brand would not be the supermarket, but a world that is based on identical values and limitations: the world of Michelin star restaurants and chefs.

 

Beer is traditionally a people’s drink and not exactly classy and the design codes for beer communicate exactly that: saturated, clear and contrasting colors, bold typography - generally with outlines and drop shadows, a robust visal language that refers to ages past with arms and medals on a monumental layout.
The upside of utilising these codes is that you are instantly recognisable as beer. The downside is that you’re basically implying that you’re just like all the others and that consumers can pick any other brand just as well.

A ‘gastronomical’ beer should be designed quite differently from a people’s drink, so we advised not to go with the beer design codes but shift upward in the direction of classier drinks like wine and whisky, without losing the beer feel entirely.

 

So here’s the result. The old fashioned aluminum foil around the neck of the bottle in a characteristic light blue color and the metallic foil labels in even colors give a traditional beer-feel but the non-artificial layout of the label and the addition of the year of production make for a wine-feel.

The varieties ‘Blonde’ and ‘White’ are akin to white wine while still being beer. Light, fresh and feastly.

The heavier ‘Double’ and ‘Triple’ look more like spirits...