Lots of Stuff in the Pipeline, and Lots of Bullets in This Post

Hello beerfriends.

I've got a bunch of stuff in the hopper (side note: I may be misusing that expression, since I can't find a good origin. The Internet seems divided.), including:

• That piece I promised on the Weyerbacher rebrand (waiting on the first label to come out this week)
• Label art for Anchorage (the post Blogger ate a few weeks ago), Stillwater (yes!), Adirondack and others
• A taxonomy for beer labels
• The Deschutes rebrand
• A long and interesting conversation with Don Feinberg, (a founder of Ommegang and importers Vanberg & DeWulf) and his designer, Chuck Robertson of Doyle Partners on the challenges of designing for imports and strange creations (More on them below)

But there's a bunch of little news and notes to hit before I get those pieces up, so...

Two of many options

• My father informed me that my comment on the knuckleball grip in last week's grumbling post on the normally good Brew Works label was misguided. I was familiar with the traditional knuckler grip of Tim Wakefield and Tom Candiotti, but apparently there are numerous grips, all of which count as long as the ball doesn't spin more than once or twice en route to the plate. I do think artist Alex Clare moved the fingers back off the laces for artistic purposes. I still think that figure is over the top, but the baseball knowledge should not have been impugned.



"Finally, a beer
just for men
who think women
are idiots"

• The Clown Shoes thing quieted down and went away, but I hope the issue doesn't. While I didn't find the labels sexist, there's still plenty of sexism in beer and it comes in lots of forms. For example, we have MillerCoors launching a Carling offshoot called Animee, for women. How do we know it's for women? It's clear, of course.

The beer... has an ABV of 4% and is put through an ultra-filtering process that removes its colour. It is flavoured with green tea and dragon fruit, and has a taste similar to an alcopop. Coors plans to trial the drink through sampling in pubs and bars before any wider roll-out. 

First we have Copen*hagen, now clear dragonfruit green tea beer. Great. No better way to respect your market than to stick to the idea that women don't like beer. Stay classy. Also, some bloggers have noted Minhas' Chick Beer, a wholly insulting concept in whose failure I will delight.

But, lest we forget that craft beer is capable of this, as well, I bring you another example of our willingness to tolerate the blatant and harp on the borderline:

Yes, it's called the Double D Blonde, and yes, the image is of a topless woman with blond hair and hops covering her breasts. It's an award-winning beer, and the design is generally well-rendered, if a bit militarochemical black-and-green in scheme, but try Google image searching for "Double D Blonde" and see if you get a picture of this beer. Again, we choose to focus on a robot with a gas pump?

Dude, I'm surfing on lousy design!

• The brains at Pyramid have finally realized their sports drink rebrand was terrible. Back to the drawing board.
• Anheuser-Busch apparently intends to take the Goose Island "312" thing national, wrapping up trademarks for area codes in major markets. Good luck with that.
• Craftcans releases its 10 favorite IPA can designs.
• Speaking of IPA, by now you may know that renowned blogger and social media master Ashley Routson aka The Beer Wench has worked with a bunch of breweries and beer orgs to put together a social media event called International #IPADay for August 4. The idea is everyone drinks some IPA and talks about it on social media as an effort to help get craft beer more into the mainstream consciousness. If you're into the beer bloggery navel-gazing like me, you also know that some people were less than enthusiastic, and the initial announcement garnered some sarcastic responses, most notably from Ezra, an artist whose work I've praised on this blog a great deal. Leaving aside the fact that someone who blogs glowingly about the brewery that employs him may want to be careful about indicting others for conflicts of interest, it did spur some more information, so there's that. Still (and I don't know any people involved) I dislike it when people in the craft beer community decide they are too cool for other people in it; we all write about beer, for hops' sake, simmer down. As usual, Alan gives us sanity. From a marketing/business perspective, I think the idea is interesting, and there's promise (though the graph is pretty misleading). The key thing to remember is that the purpose is to use one of craft beer's most popular styles to spur interest in non-beer-drinking members of the social media multiverse.
• Along those lines, The Builder of Coalitions has an awesome list of the top 10 reasons snobs of all kinds drive us nuts. Full disclosure: I do the first-name thing.
• Cheese and Cheers has a great piece on Randy Mosher's Design for a new label.

As always, your reward for reading the linksy posts is a lovely piece of label art, this one from Methow Valley, for the Conscious Culture Festival:

I guess one could also say this is sexist, if he or she wanted to, as it certainly has themes of sexuality. But I think it's a tasteful peace evoking the 60s roots of the liberal festival. What I like is the level of detail within the swirling border/hair. We've got a nice sunset, some lush looking flora and fauna, and label that very much communicates the "flower child" aesthetic and values (yes, "free love" was one of those, but this seems quite family-friendly to me). The watermark background lets them use a blue that makes all the colors stand out while still having some depth and providing us a close-up view of some of the more intricate parts of the image.