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I'll keep this site up as is for now, but I don't intend uploading any new posts here for the foreseeable future.

Castle Lager #Homegrown Campaign

The main aim of this blog is to draw attention to the artists who have created the colourful labels adorning your favourite bottle of microbrewed/craft beer. However, a recent campaign by Castle Lager,* one of the most recognisable brands of beer in South Africa, features contributions by several prominent South African artists.

Image source

Released for the 2017/2018 festive period, the Homegrown campaign consists of four limited edition 330 ml cans representing the ingredients used to brew Castle Lager. Each piece has been created by a different local artist.

The first six-pack I bought contained three cans each of Water and Hops. These cans were enclosed in the regular shrink-wrap packaging. A week or so later I picked up a second six pack containing Barley and maize. This time the plastic wrap was different from the regular packaging, featuring a a design entitled Barley, Maize, Hops and Water by Thulisizwe Mamba.

This is a great initiative, but unfortunately for the Homegrown campaign there has been little to no coverage via social media. Not even the official Castle Lager Facebook and Twitter accounts have given it some coverage. The one exception is the official Instagram account which shared the following four videos:


1. Barley - Cameron Platter
Platter's website is a bit eccentric and may induce photosensitive epilepsy. I found it a bit tedious to navigate, so couldn't compare his offering to any previous works, save to say this doesn't resemble a spray painted cheese curl.

A post shared by Castle Lager SA (@castlelagersa) on Dec 19, 2017 at 6:48am PST

2. Water - Bruce Mackay
The can design is reminiscent of several pieces in Mackay's exceptionally intricate Former Mountains and Crazed Waves series.

A post shared by Castle Lager SA (@castlelagersa) on Dec 21, 2017 at 11:49pm PST

3. Maize - Karabo Moletsane

According to Moletsane's Behance project, her design was inspired by flame grilled corn, a local street food. 

A post shared by Castle Lager SA (@castlelagersa) on Dec 27, 2017 at 12:11am PST

4. Hops - Heidi Chisholm

Chisholm has created several textile patterns during her career. If you swapped flowers for hop cones in the Jackie So, Rosemary and MO Baby! designs, then these are her most similar works.

A post shared by Castle Lager SA (@castlelagersa) on Dec 28, 2017 at 11:46pm PST

I really like the idea of having a fifth artist design the shrink-wrap packaging, but think this could have been implemented better. It would have been great if Castle/SAB followed some of the trends in the craft beer scene by releasing a limited edition 4-pack that included one of each of the four limited edition cans. Either way, I'm really happy to have completed the small collection, and will proudly add them to the "Wall of Beer" the next time I get a chance.

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* Castle Lager is brewed by South African Breweries (SAB), which is a subsidiary of the world's largest brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV (AB InBev), and is therefore anything but craft beer. Despite many craft drinkers denouncing Castle, drinking macro/industrial beer is not something to be ashamed of. In fact, it's a guilty pleasure of several well-known and respected craft brewers in the United States. One simply cannot deny the consistency SAB has achieved in the process of brewing millions of litres of Castle.

Wagon Trail Brewing Co. labels by Fanakalo

This is the first of what will hopefully become a series of articles featuring the label designs of various South African craft breweries.

I couldn't have put it together without the input from Jan Solms and Rohan Etsebeth at Fanakalo, the permission to use several photographs from the Wagon Trail Brewing Co. website from Lance Bouma, and lastly, my brother who dug through boxes of my bottle collection in order to send me photos that I didn't use.

If you're interested in a free PDF copy of the piece then please drop me a line.

A couple of extra shout-outs:

The brush font used for the front cover and main heading is Edo SZ by Vic Fieger. It's 100% free to use and can be downloaded here.

The small globe icon seen on the back cover used to represent website URLs was designed by inipagi. It's also free and can be found here.

Craft Beer Label Design topic on Scoop.it!

This isn't the first blog focusing on design and packaging of the global craft beer scene. Oh Beautiful Beer! has been sharing eye-catching beer packaging from around the world since 2011. I recently stumbled upon another blog, Beers Illustrated, creating for the Australian craft beer scene what I would like to do in South African one.

Instead of writing a post summarising every article that has been published on the label artwork of local breweries, I decided to create a Scoop.it! topic. The topic isn't limited to South African beer labels either, as I have included several articles and interviews that I come across featuring prominent designers and brewers from the US. I will continue to curate and add to the Craft Beer Label Design topic as I continue my research and find more content.

Behind the scenes at the 2018 Beer Label Design Awards

Jacqueline Lahoud shared a photograph earlier today showing the judging process of the first annual Beer Label Design Awards.

Image from Twitter.

Several of the beer labels are easily recognisable, but a few are a little more tricky to identify. Here's  a list of the breweries that I've managed to identify so far (clockwise from left);

• Poison City Brewing, Durban (3 bottles)
• Mitchell's Brewing, Knysna (6 bottles)
• Little Wolf Brewery, Cape Town (5 bottles)
• Long Beach Brewery, Cape Town (4 bottles)
• Unknown (1 bottles)
• Unknown (2? bottles) Red Sky Brew (?), Gordon's Bay
• Red Bridge Brewing Co., Knysna (3 bottles)

I'll update the list of entries/finalists as more information becomes available.

-- Update --

A second photograph showing the judges at work was uploaded.

Image from Twitter

From this image we can clearly see that there are a lot more entries than shown in the first image, which is a great relief, but many of them are not easily identifiable. These are what I've managed to identify in addition to the list above;

• Red Sky Brew, Gordon's Bay - one of the "unknowns" from above. Not 100% sure about the identification, but the logo on the box looks to be that of Red Sky.
• The green, yellow, blue and red crowns could represent four beers from the Drifter Brewing Company range. Again not 100% certain, but they are the only local brewery that I can think of at the moment that uses different coloured crown caps.
• The RedRock Brewing Company, Johannesburg - the box on the top right.

On the counter from left to right;

• Darling Brew, Darling - distinctive yellow and black label of Slow Beer on 'Belgian-styled' 330 ml bottle.
• Mountain Brewing Company, Worcester - colour and label shape match that of the seasonal release Cherry Stumpie.
• 3x unknowns - look to be extra bottles from Poison City Brewing
• 1x unknown - looks to be another bottle belonging to Red Sky Brew
• 2x unknowns
• Soweto Brewing Company, Soweto - the 750 ml bottles are quite distinctive in shape.
• 1x unknwon
• Stellenbosch Brewing Co., Stellenbosch - labels shape and colours match a bottle from the core range and a bottle of Mass Hoppiness.
• Striped Horse - distinctive white, red and black bands of a Striped Horse Craft Lager label.
• Possibly some unknowns, but more likely some extra bottles from RedRock.

Excluding all the unknowns, I've managed to come up with 13 possible breweries to have entered the competition. That's not bad going for the first year the competition is being held, but at the same time a little disappointing as there are a lot of great labels that I didn't see laid out on the judges tables, particularly from outside of the Western Cape.

New Name. Same Project

I started reaching out to a few breweries and design agencies/studios last month. So far all of the designers I've contacted have shown a willingness to contribute to the project, but I've had very few responses from the breweries. There are also a lot of labels that I would like to include from breweries that have already ceased operations, and getting in contact with them has been a challenge.

It's for these reasons that I've decided to change the focus of the project slightly. Instead of only being able to share stories about a select few of the established microbreweries that have been around long enough to have undergone significant branding changes, to focusing more on the actual beer labels themselves and the designers behind their creation. This will allow the incredible designs from those smaller and newer microbreweries, as well as those that have stopped production to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the labels from the well-known, big craft beer brands found in the liquor section of every major supermarket chain in South Africa. 

The revolution may be dead, but like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the South African Beer Label Project will persevere. Maybe some of the (r)evolution of craft stories that I'd started writing will be able to find a place somewhere in the new project, but for now the evolution stories have been shelved.

Inaugural Beer Label Design Awards

This year sees Winemag.co.za hosting the inaugural Beer Label Design Awards (BLDA) in conjunction with the fourth annual Wine Label Design Awards, both sponsored by Rotolabel. Winners of last years Wine Label Design Awards may be viewed here.

According to the entry kit, the rationale behind the BLDA is to reward outstanding designs as an influence on beer purchases. Judging criteria will include originality and execution of concept, shelf appeal, as well effectiveness as a piece of communication. Entries will be split into two categories; 1) single labels and 2) labels forming a series.

Beers entered must be produced in South Africa and be commercially available. Entries close on 15 February 2018, and must include a 150 word creative brief.

Welcome to the revolution!

I've been wanting to write a book focusing on the development of South African craft beer branding for quite some time. The problem is that I just haven't made the time to do it. Then it occurred to me to break up the project into a series of standalone articles/chapters that could potentially be compiled into a book at a later stage. 

So what you'll find here will (hopefully) be 'preprint' versions of these single pieces in the form of a series of blog posts, likely intermingled with some other news from the South African craft beer scene.

I intend to reach out to several of the brewers and breweries behind the South African craft beer revolution and discuss how their physical breweries, as well as the brewery's branding have evolved in the years since their establishment. Essentially what I want to disseminate are the stories behind the "evolution of the revolution." Hence the brackets in the blog's title.