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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 brew...

22 February 2018

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.

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