The art of selling beer: Catch the eye, but deliver on image’s promise

More breweries are operating now in the U.S. than ever before, upping the competition for precious cooler and shelf space. Craft brewers are opening at a two-a-day clip, and new and older operations alike are increasingly relying on a simple device to stand out from the crowd of more than 4,100 competitors: the beer label.
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Legacy brewers such as Fort Collins-based New Belgium Brewing, Deschutes Brewery in Oregon and Twisted Pine in Boulder recently updated their packaging. Other smaller operators have invested time and chunks of money to enlist artists, graphic designers and full-fledged branding firms to help them stay in the game.

“As a brewer, it pains me to say that it’s more important than the liquid inside,” said Kevin Selvy, who started Crazy Mountain Brewing Co. in the Vail Valley with his wife, Marisa.

The little mountain brewery is in the throes of a massive expansion and is setting up a second location in Breckenridge Brewery’s spacious former digs at 471 Kalamath St. in Denver. (Breckenridge moved to a $36 million farmhouse-style brewery on 12 acres in Littleton.)

Crazy Mountain’s expansion brings with it the ability to package beer in 12-ounce bottles and also vaults the company up the list of the nation’s largest brewers.

Crazy Mountain’s image needed to mature, too, Selvy said.

On its cans, Crazy Mountain’s logo took the backstage to funky scribbles touting “Crazy Mountain Amber Ale,” “Mountain Livin’ Pale Ale,” “Lava Lake Wit” and “Lawyers, Guns & Money.”

“I think where we really failed was there was no cohesion between our different labels. If you walked into a liquor store and you saw five of our cans on the shelf, you couldn’t tell that they were all from the same brewery,” Selvy said. “It was all good artwork, but there was nothing that held it together.”
Crazy Mountain spent most of a year working on a brand overhaul with Moxie Sozo, the Boulder-based design firm behind the crazed rabbits and frenzied beavers wrapping cans of Bootstrap Brewing’s IPA and Pale Ale… CONTINUE READING AT THE DENVER POST