Beer glasses with designs from the arcade cabinets of classic Atari games. Wow. I want some.
Bailey
Category Archives: design
Thoughtful beer geek gift
Bailey’s little brother had a fit of thoughtfulness and for Christmas this year got this very nice chap to engrave six beer glasses with a version of the graphic from our blog’s header.
Drinking our own brews out of our own branded glasses is very satisfying indeed!
Vaguely tasteful St George's Day brand
Slain from the Station House Brewery in Frodsham, Cheshire, is actually pretty nicely branded for a St George’s Day cash-in.
It was so restrained compared to the other beers on the bar (British Bulldog and Old Enoch Powell) that it took me a while to ‘get it’.
As for the beer, I think it’s the only example of what those who are into beer styles would call a ‘northern brown ale’ I’ve ever had on draught. It wasn’t fantastic, but it certainly made a change.
Imperial Burton Ale
What’s an Imperial Burton Ale? Or a luncheon stout? They both feature on attractive historical beer labels from Essex brewery Ward’s available at the excellent Foxearth local history website. There are also some great historical photos of the brewery and its people from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Best old sign in London?
This sign advertising the range of Charrington’s beers is about two metres square and now sits on the side of an otherwise very plainly decorate budget-conscious hotel on Markhouse Road, Walthamstow. It’s one of our very favourites.
Some random pub livery photos
A lazy post for Friday — here are a few more bits of old pub livery we’ve come across on our travels. Click on them for bigger versions.
The Chequers, Walthamstow Market
More pub livery in London
Two more bits of old pub livery spotted on Mare Street in Hackney at the weekend.
Grain Brewery — good beer, great branding
Grain Brewery are riding the zeitgeist with their packaging — they’ve come up with a label design which makes their delicious porter look like some kind of health food.
They’ve cleverly chosen to remind people of what’s actually in the beer. If you’ve brewed yourself, you’ll know how nice the grain smells when it goes into the tun. That’s what this branding makes me think of.
That’s presumably why our local free-range, organic, fair-trade deli is stocking a good chunk of their range.
So far, we’ve only tried the porter. It smells like espresso and tastes sour and fruity. The head lasted all the way to bottom of the glass. It’s fortified with port and bottle-conditioned, so was anything but dull. These are qualities we like in a beer.
We’ll be trying the others soon!
Bailey
Beer photography — help yourself
We’ve put some of our beer photos online for people to use on their beer blogs, should they find themselves in dire need of a picture for a post.
Here they are in a little slideshow:
http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf
Or you can go to Picasa Web Albums and help yourself!
Dimple Glasses
In yesterday’s post, what I didn’t mention was that the Old Monk is serving its real ale in old fashioned handled dimple glasses. I gather that a couple of would-be trendy pubs in the Islington area have started to do the same thing.
This is an interesting affectation which seems designed to appeal simultaneously to the old school beer fan and the retro-ironic hipster. I suspect we’re going to see a lot more of it about.
I gather the reason for their demise was that they were relatively expensive to make, prone to breaking, and hard to stack. Those arguments hardly hold up now that fans of German wheat beers or Belgian obscurities are getting their favourite tipples served in ever-more elaborately shaped and printed glasses, some of them a foot tall, others as delicate as egg shells.
Mild in particular tastes a little bit nicer out of a dimple — well, it does to me, anyway, because that’s how my grandad used to drink it. Let’s hope that by May, when every decent pub in the land will have a mild on, the dimple has made its triumphant comeback everywhere.
Picture from h-e-d.co.uk, who also sell dimples if you fancy a few to use at home.
Bailey