Beer Names and Labels

Generic brown bottles don’t really appeal. Brown plastic bottles appeal even less. You don’t see commercial beers without a label, so why should home brew be any different?

When you carefully hand make a beer, what could be a better tribute than to couple it with a hand made label. But not just any label. In the case of my clone of Garage Project La Calevera Cateria (which has a stunning label design from Autumn McGrail) I decided to stick with the La Calevara Catrina theme and do a handmade linocut version of a detail from PaleHorse’s Caterina. Caterina Neue 1.0 (though I guess it should have maybe been Caterina Nuevo 1.0)

This was printed on my little bottle jack press on what I think is 128gsm Glossy stock (we had it sitting round at work unlabeled, hence not much good for doing customer samples on) using some old offset PMS430C ink (another TradeMe purchase) and then when dry will be sellotaped on to the bottles.

As the beer is still warm conditioning I am not sure how this combination of stock, ink and adhesive will hold up when refrigerated so it might end up being something different for the chocolate cherry stout (which I have decided to call “Joan Jettison” - an oblique reference to Garage Project’s Cherry Bomb and the fact that I might want to throw it away after trying it)