Amager Bryghus' "Lust" Beer is Too Sexy for Sweden, Just Sinful Enough for a Blog Post

So, last month, the Swedes told Danish brewer Amager Bryghus that one of their beers would need to be distributed with blacked out labels, because it was just too freakin sexy. Actually, they said it was too "sexual," but my way of describing it is more fun and makes it sound like it was delivered by Horatio Sanz in a mariachi uniform behind Chris Kattan playing Antonio Banderas.

According to the story on UPI:

Danish brewer Amager Bryghus said its Lust beer -- part of a seven-part Sinner Series of beers featuring cartoon labels -- will receive a special label for sale in Sweden's liquor stores, run by state-owned company Systembolaget, after the retailer declared the cartoon image of a woman partially submerged in water while apparently nude was too suggestive. 

"We can't accept the label, it's against Sweden's alcohol laws," Systembolaget spokesman Lennart Agen said. "It's quite a sexual label." 

Amager Bryhus said Lust beer will be sold in Sweden with the cartoon portion of the label blacked out. 

"We had to go through 10 attempts before they'd accept it," said Henrik Papso, head of communications at the brewery. "We were trying for a bit of humor with the text, but they wouldn't let me get away with it."

Well, that is intriguing. First, it involves the Denmark and Sweden, two of my favorite nations (during WWII, when my ancestors were being exterminated and FDR was a little too "busy" to bomb a train track or two, the Danes and Swedes were basically the only two nations that took serious efforts to stand up to Nazi genocide efforts). Also, I have been known to write about over sexualized beer labels before. And if it's called "Lust," it must be pretty serious. So let's see what this scandalous label looks like...

Is it the fact that she has black hair? BOOM Nordic humor! 

...That's it?

I was kind of expecting some kind of lustful act, or at least a wanton gaze. All I've got is an anime girl taking a bath with a vaguely flirtatious look.

I mean, this is not great art or anything, and of course her breasts are absurdly large, but this is pretty damn mild compared to the chauvinism and lowbrow gutter humor we see all the time. I'm left thinking the Swedes are really prude.

Since we're doing this, and I'm interested in sin (academically!), let's take a look at the others in the Sinner Series. All art is by Simon Hartvig Daugaard:

How Lew Bryson looks when someone calls a 6% ABV beer "sessionable"

WAIT. What?

So the submerged girl out of Sailor Moon draws a stink, but Demonface McBareboob is okay? To be fair, I have no idea if this label made it to Sweden (one suspects not), but if one is looking for overly risque label art to criticize, I'd start with the Skinimax-in-Gehenna label before the CW-at-7-pm one.

How I look when someone illustrates a blonde ale with a blonde woman.

 Ha! I love this guy. He's not going anywhere. Way to capture sloth, Danes!

How my friends looked when I complained that it wasn't that warm in Austin.

She looks more miffed than envious, but I see it.

How I look when I get a check for writing about beer.

Little greedy guy caressing money. Straightforward. These labels are pretty much on the nose. Nicely illustrated, not too ridiculous.

How I look after a beer tasting with free cheese.

This one's got a little more creativity. Pretty disturbing, actually, but it gets the point across. His ravenous bellymouth appears to be eating giant hops. Like y'do.

I never look like this.

The most conceptual of these. I like the blindfolded man and the trappings of pomp.

 They put them all together in one nice, weird sin art piece:

Now THAT was a party.

We see the lusty one in the back there, thong-clad, coquettish and topless. Everyone else looks pretty much the same. I still love the sloth guy the most.

One other label I just wanted to throw out there, since I'm pretty unlikely to spend a lot of time on a Danish brewery again any time soon. It's an IPA called the Kaaad:

She's not happy; she's just drawn that way.

I am pretty sure that, vague bunny veneer or no, that is the most sexual label we've seen here today. I mean, one could argue, I suppose, over whether a rabbit is ever really naked, and whether fur by itself constitutes covering... or one could look at this woman's fairly prominent nipples and very human face and say that if any label needs a black bar, this would be it. Which would be a shame, because the bright Easter-y colors and the double entrendres of the bunny and eggs are rather clever, by beer label standards.

Of course, I don't believe labels should have black censorship bars. The drinking age in Sweden is 18, so by then you can also buy pornography (and, given Europe's slightly less prudish view on nudity, you've probably seen a breast or two on TV by then). The point is, no 10-year-old will be wandering through a store and scandalized. Actually, none of the labels here should really scandalize anyone. These aren't overt sex acts, or even anything that constitutes an act. I wouldn't even think these are particularly sexual, but then I don't confuse the human form with sex. If the first beer was called "bathe" instead of "lust," I wonder if the Swedes would have felt quite so compelled to censor it.

Session #75: The Business of Brewing

The Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, is an opportunity once a month for beer bloggers from around the world to get together and write from their own unique perspective on a single topic. Each month, a different beer blogger hosts the Session, chooses a topic and creates a round-up listing all of the participants, along with a short pithy critique of each entry. This month's Session, hosted at Allbrews, is about business of opening and running a commercial brewery: "What were the prescient decisions that saved the day or the errors of omission or commission that caused an otherwise promising enterprise to careen tragically off the rails?"

This one is up my alley, I'd say.

First, some reality: Most small breweries, like most small businesses, are not started by people with any serious or formal knowledge of business. They are started by people who are good at a craft, and think that should be enough to be successful. It has been my experience that, in beer, the brewers are often bearded introverts who would rather talk to yeast than people. There are also a group of (more recent) brewery founders that think beer is cool and like talking to people, and they do not intend to let their lack of beer knowledge get in the way of their business.

Both of these types of brewery owners come with - shall we say - some challenges. The obvious:

Of course, making good beer is not nearly enough to do well at business. Business involves managing cash flow, inventory, supply chains and public profile. One defunct PA brewery, Legacy, made some great beer. They're gone now, and their intellectual property is owned by Ruckus, a marketing company that just announced plans to open a commercial brewery in Allentown. 

Being good at business is also not good enough without good beer. Let's look at Bavarian Barbarian, another defunct PA brewery with some good marketing and aggressive instincts. Unfortunately, their beer never got consistent. One batch would be decent, then the next flawed. With so much good beer out there, the market won't tolerate that for long. 

None of this matters if you have a brewpub, in which case you have a monopoly, and the margins are so good that the beer can stink and people will drink it and you'll be fine. Just ask Dogfish Head, whose beer was by all accounts undrinkable for the first four years, when the restaurant kept them afloat (they've gotten better, I hear).

But if you've got a production brewery, balancing the need for business with the need for product is a tough thing; most people only have enough lifetimes to get good at one side of that.

In my upcoming meadery, we're trying to solve the problem with the most effective way I've seen in beer: Get one of each kind of owner.

Now, my business partner is clean shaven and personable, but he knows he's no businessman. He's a virtuoso meadmaker. I'd venture to say I know more about beer and mead than most of the marketing-happy guys who start a beer company because it seems cool, but business school didn't teach me about degassing and nutrient additions. So, while we can help each other and give opinions, we also have spheres of expertise where we defer to each other. I wrote the business plan and Mike determined what our equipment needs are; Mike told me which flavor ideas I had were not likely to work and I told him we need more products that don't take 4 months to produce. We believe it to be a good partnership, but of course we're not operational yet.

The other thing to note is that breweries can have drastically different goals. Some want to grow and produce tons of beer and make tons of ever-growing revenue. Some want to run a small, noted successful operation that basically prints money on good profits. Both are fine. What does not work when a brewery thinks it wants to be big, but isn't sure. Growth requires risk and investment; if you're a naturally cautious, risk-averse person (as many brewers are), then get comfortable with being small or get comfortable with being out of your comfort zone (a paradox!). If you're a growth-focused, world-domination type of person, my advice is to know upfront where the money is coming from, and what you're giving up for it (usually equity or collateral for a loan).

In the last few years, we've started to see that the beer business can lead to some big returns. Goose Island, Crispin Ciders, Terrapin and others have seen exits and investments at significant multipliers. Beer companies like Pedernales and Churchkey found ready and willing investors necessary to help them make a big marketing push out of the gate. This is in sharp contrast to the traditional craft brewery investment, which were really closer to buying art or a really small baseball team (i.e., one bought it as a luxury ownership item) than it was to investing in a startup (where one wants to get rich). With big money will come harsher scrutiny and competition, and those who actually want to make some cash in beer will require more business savvy.

Like this guy.

It's become fashionable to say that we're in a "craft beer bubble." I agree to the extent that no industry grows double digits forever, but not much beyond that. It's a big country and lots of people like beer; just as there is room for a lot of restaurants and coffee shops, there's plenty of room for small breweries. There is limited room at the top, as there always is, but not everyone wants to be Applebee's or Starbucks. I'll end by saying that one trait that all successful breweries I've seen share with other successful businesses is a willingness to acknowledge mistakes and learn on the fly. Every single business makes mistakes, some of them enormous (InBev planned to move Hoegaarden to Jupille; everyone said the water wouldn't work); when those mistakes become obvious, the businesses that recognize it and keep pride from running the operation are the ones that survive to brew another day (InBev scrapped the plan; Hoegaarden still tastes good; the company bought Budweiser).

The Best and Worst Beer Art of April, including Star Trek beer, zombies and Elysian's new Oddworld Series

Another month in the bag, beerfriends. A sparse month for design releases, but some cool stuff nonetheless.

In the "Star Trek-Craft Beer overlap news" segment, we have two pieces of news. One is that Stone will produce a beer with Fark and nerdlord Wil Wheaton (formerly the snotnosed kid Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation), called, of course, "Farking Wheaton."

I actually love the design. I think it looks great, and I love the name (though I could have lived without calling it a "w00tstout;" I don't think this project was in danger of not being precious enough).

Incidentally, if you don't know why Wheaton is a big deal in nerd circles, watch this:

He is kind of lovable.

Not to be outdone, Canadian brewery Cannery Brewing Company has released Vulcan Ale, "a logical choice for a palate pleasing libation." Lots of puns and references that Leonard Nimoy and Tim Russ would appreciate are littered throughout the label:

Not best or worst, really, but strangest departure of the month belongs to Michigan's Dark Horse Brewing. Inspired by zombies, it appears, they decided to eschew their traditionally awesome woodcut-like work for a more 3Floyds-esque look in their new IPA mix case:

Zombie lumberjacks...

...and bigfoot truckers...

...and robot mermaids?

I do not begin to understand these labels. I welcome any and all explanatory feedback or wild speculation as to what fueled this very strange art direction. I can't even find any story behind the "Dekoorc Eert" name.

Best labels of the month go to Almanac Beer Company, who has some really beautiful two-color font and woodcut design:

I don't think this design is technically new, but these labels are and it's the first time I've seen it, so... Yeah.

Another winner: Elysian Brewing Company, for their announcement of their Oddland series with artist Jim Woodring:

Also good: Avondale Brewing Company, but I'm going to do a full post on them.

The worst of the month is an old favorite. Every year, Bridgeport picks a different fruit to put in its Belgian style sour ale, and every year they call it the Stumptown Tart, which they illustrate with a smiling woman reclining in garters next to some fruit:

Tart! Ha! 'Cuz she likes having sex! GET IT?!

On Beer and Family

This story appeared in the April 18 edition of the Gazette van Detroit. I've been writing a monthly column there, Saison D'etre, since late 2012.

Growing up, I was surrounded by wine.

The son of two oenophiles, I was raised in the European tradition of alcohol with meals as a nuanced accompaniment. My father still boasts that, by age five, I was able to discern from the smell of a Bordeaux the area of France in which it was produced. He usually follows this story with line “I’m not sure what’s happened since,” in which he is 37% joking.

What has happened, of course, is that the appreciation for wine I had instilled took root and, some years later, bloomed as a love of beer. Just as wine was for my parents, beer is for me a fascinating, faceted frontier that not only enriches the taste of meals, but the experience of dining with loved ones.

My parents loved about wine what I do about beer: Balance, tradition, complexity and a subject that inspires and enhances delightful conversation with meals. For them, the place that embodied this was the South of France; for me, that place is Belgium.

And now something strange has happened in my relationship with my father. After a few years of working at it, my dad, the longtime oenophile and Corona drinker, has gotten into beer.

He’s started with the classics: working through the Trappists and other big-name Belgian breweries. His tastes tend toward the round, malty complexity of Belgian and Belgian-style beers (not surprising for a wine lover), so they make a good entry point.

Father and son at Lost Abbey

As with the fall of Rome, the exact moment of change is impossible to pick out. I distinctly remember, though, watching a football game with him at an Applebee’s, and my father finding the Heineken he’d ordered too light and tasteless for him (the first time he’d ever expressed such a thought about beer).

It’s been a progression from there.

Like me, he finds most of the American imitators lacking; like him, I’m pretty sure there’s no more perfect a beer than Saison Dupont; like me, he’s adamant about trying even beers he’s pretty sure he’s not going to like. I get fairly regular texts and emails with brief reviews on every new tasting.

I just spent a week in San Diego on a vacation with Dad, and I warned him that the epicenter of hoppiness would probably challenge his palette a little. But what might have been an inauspicious first beer trip together instead was a perfect tour of the benefits of our new common ground.

Whether taking a delight at the unexpectedly incredible environment and food at Stone World Bistro and Gardens, enjoying the Belgian inspirations of the Lost Abbey, or sharing a disapproving look at one of the mediocre brewpubs, beer provided the perfect accompaniment for our first father-son trip in a several years.

We did go to Belgium together once, but it was some time ago when the only thing I knew about beer was that I liked it, and the only thing my father knew about beer was that he really didn’t. At this rate, I imagine we will make another stop soon.

Dad at Stone Brewing Bistro and World Gardens.

Sharing an artisanal love – whether Bordeaux, farmhouse ales, or fancy mineral water – isn’t a necessary part of a paternal bond. Dad and I took many great trips together before he could even stand an interesting beer (some of those were to places where there was no good beer to be had, anyway). But the first brewers understood that, like any other shared interest, the enjoyment of beer provides a subject around which good conversations can occur, and those conversations can bring us closer together.

The paintings of Lost Abbey's label art.

Arcade Brewery Design Contest Yields Many 8-bit Renderings of William Wallace

Greetings beerfriends from San Diego, land of hops and sun with a slightly chilly breeze. A few assorted beer art things I wanted to take a look at:

First up: Arcade Brewery had its first design contest, for their Scotch Ale, "William Wallace Wrestle Fest" The submissions ranged as one might imagine, with a few hitting the whole Arcade Brewery theme of old video games and doing a kid of 8-bit art style.

I don't think William Wallace actually looked like Mel Gibson, but I find the attempt to replicate Mel as he would have appeared in Punch-Out, and then sever his head, an interesting one.

He definitely could have been a Double Dragon boss. 

More of a 16-bit approach. The radiating lines are effective at making him look like he's quivering.

 Your winner, by Matthew LaFleur, takes a less digital approach:

Wrestling a dragon is made only slightly harder by having a woman dangling off one's arm.

Nice artwork, great detail in the figures and the bizarre foreshortening looks really cool (and will, even more so, I'm sure, on a bottle).

Next: I received in the mail my copy of the new Craft Beerds book by Fred Abercrombie. It looks awesome  and has some incredible artwork in it:

My blurb was first on the back! HA! Take that, Oh Beautiful Beer!

So if you're short a Mother's/Father's Day gift for a parental beer-lover, give it a look-see.

Victory et al. had their Amber Waves event, and while I was not invited (read: comped), it looks like it was really cool. The art in the online auction afterward appears to have sold for quite reasonable amounts. We'll see what happens with next year, but between that and Brooklyn's traveling Mash thing, the beer-art confluence appears to be on the rise.

Carol Stoudt with "The Queen of Hops" art at Amber Waves

Other news and notes:

• The always-well-designed Vanberg and Dewulf portfolio is out.
• Check out OBB's beautiful images of the new Summit Repeal Prohibition poster.
• Trendhunter compiles 32 ridiculous ways to hold beer, including facial hair koozies and a device to put beer in one's bra.

The Insanely Opulent Collateral Briefcase for Budweiser's Black Crown

Some things are so enormous, they demand attention.

Quit snickering; she did not say that.

I mean that I do a blog on marketing design, and most of the stuff I write about differs in form, but not function. It's package design, printed collateral, the odd bottle opener or glassware, and lots of label art. I love it; it makes it easy to learn lots about the industry norms. But the reason for it is that most breweries are small businesses, and cash-conscious. When one gets to the point where it has money, like Dogfish or Victory, it puts that money into expansion or bigger marketing things it can sell (like Dogfish's art). None of them are big enough that they can do crazy marketing things just to do it.

Only a few breweries in the world could do that. One of them is Anheuser-Busch-InBev, largest brewing conglomerate in the world.

I got a huge briefcase from Budweiser for their Black Crown launch during the Super Bowl. It's sort of the capstone to the Project 12 thing I've written about quite a bit, and so they had a Budweiser-sized launch.

Here's what you can do with massive marketing dollars:

It's a giant silver briefcase. It looks sort of like something you'd keep launch codes or cyberwarfare tech or things with half-lives in.

Seriously, it's like 2 and a half feet thick.

So what's inside?

Holy crap.

A bunch of foam egg carton on the top, and a wonderfully insulated display that includes three beers, a branding card, and...

I literally have no idea how much this cost.

Right, that's six vials on the left of what taste is. From top: beechwood chips, caramel malt, a lipstick smear (aka "passion"), glitter confetti (aka "great show"), a ballot from project 12 ("handpicked"), and nothing ("the unknown").

Yep. It's good to have money. They sent me - a not particularly influential person - a giant briefcase filled with mostly just marketing items that serve no purpose. I'm really trying to figure out what to do with it, now that I've had the beer.

About the beer: it's a mediocre lager. Sort of like a stronger, low-rent Yuengling. It lacks any real flavor or character. It's a bummer that the promises of the Project 12 experimentation ended in a very bland beer that, while technically I suppose is flawless, is also definitively lifeless.

I still have serious questions about the whole idea's ability to do anything for Budweiser's market share. I don't see it cracking much of the craft market, and if it does manage to cannibalize some of Bud's existing market, I don't see the consumers staying with it when they can have a Sam Adams Boston Lager. Perhaps the goal is to get consumers before they leave for other beers, in a sort of stop-loss effort? Or maybe the market research team has decided people only like craft because it seems expensive, so if they launch something that seems more expensive, people will drink it. Whatever the case, Bud is obviously committed to it, so I don't think it's going away any time soon.

And I guess this briefcase was a big enough gesture to get me to write about something I really never planned on, so in that sense it worked. Hard to imagine the ROI was positive on the marketing effort, but in big business, sometimes sustaining market position counts as much as generating sales. It really is two different worlds.

New Brewery Branding: Los Angeles Ale Works

Back from Texas, Beerfriends, at least for the moment, and I have a new brewery to look at. It's new to you, but I actually had my first contact with Los Angeles Ale Works about a year and a half ago. They're less than a week away from the end of an already successful Kickstarter campaign, and their new stretch goal is to add an extra fermenter to get up and running.

But a new brewery means branding, people.

Let's start with the logo:

Straightforward, if a bit busy. That little bottle text will be, one would assume, gone in smaller uses. Still a lot going on with the gears and the relatively detailed brew kettle. It's a bit odd to have the LA with some sharp little serifs, and the rest of the text in a capped sans serif, except for the LLC, which is weirdly also a serif typeface.

Here's how it will look smaller:

And we see that one would actually be wrong in the assumption about getting rid of the small text. A fairly classic rookie mistake is to put too much into logos (it's one I've made), and it looks like LA Ale Works might be falling into that trap a bit with the logo. Those big serif letters do look pretty swank on leather like this, and the gear stands out well. There's just a touch too much fine detail and small text.

Let's look at the art for the first beer, the Gams-Bart (Goat's Beard):

From the owners, John and Kristofer:

"The Goat's Beard is the feather or brush that sits in an Bavarian Alpine Hat (Lodenhut). Gams-Bart is a Bavarian Style Roggenbier, which is like a bavarian hefeweizen, but uses Rye instead of Wheat." The beer has won an amateur medal at just about every meaningful competition, so it's probably a great Roggenbier. They're brewing it in the quasi-gypsy method that's become a popular collaboration among craft breweries, assisting Ohana Brewing Company on the brewing days.

The art, though: It's by Ken Barnes, an artist/designer who goes by the firm name BSR Branding. The piece reminds me of some of the game hunting tromp l'oeil ("trick the eye") paintings by Alexander Pope. It's simple, detailed and striking. We can only get a glimpse of it in label context in the full projected lineup below:

Stil, it looks very cool. Let's take a look a few other potential labels.

The Parliament Porter:

Pretty straight take on Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta. I have to admit, I'm not totally sure how the intellectual property on such images would work, but I feel like the odds of DC Comics not sending C&D t o LAAW if this hits the market are pretty low. It's well-rendered enough, but it doesn't really bring a whole lot other than a reference to someone else's artwork.

The Dampf Maschine:

We're back to a foreign language beer name, with a touch of irony because it's a California common lager (what we used to call a "steam beer" before Anchor trademarked the term). Cool steampunk dirigibles, nice placement of the logo on the airships, as well. The logo on the label, though, now has even more words surrounding it in the bottom right, which is going to make it even harder to read from any distance farther away than one's hand.

I like the distressed type on the left, and the white/red that frames the labels. That layout will probably be distinctive enough to be apparent from across a bar. The artwork so far is very good, if a bit inconsistent in theme (we have postmodern comics, steampunk airships, and German hunting hats). The one theme that remains is that of internationalism (particularly German, if we look at the big spread above), but the art itself is still a bit scattered.

Overall, for a new brewery, the branding efforts of LAAW are pretty impressive. It's a level of professionalism and refinement not usually seen from new breweries (frankly, because they usually can't afford it). That, the numerous amateur medals, and their Kickstarter success all indicate this could be a West Coast brewery to watch in the coming months.

Okay, enough for now. I've got a huge backlog that I almost certainly can't clear, but it's good to be home and writing again.