Shooting a movie but can’t land that lucrative product placement deal?  We’ve got your covered.  Over at The Earl Hayes Press, you can find a wide assortment of fake beer bottles, cans, and packaging until one macrobrewer drops a few thousand in your lap.

They bottles all look a little dated and clearly came from a time before craft beer packaging came alive — there’s a noticeable lack of color and creativity.

from flickr

Our canning line should be in the building near July 4. It will be a couple of moths to get it up and running, but should start seeing Pale Ale in cans in late 2011.

We’re on the fence about what other beers to release, but I think we’ll have a couple of different brews available.

Cans will only be a small part of our output, but we’re excited to see how they’re received.

There are so many places where you can’t or won’t bring glass…up here in the foothills it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to bring a bunch of bottles with you in your backpack! This is really the reason we’re going for this.

From flickr user HamishM

The team at Moa Brewery reckon a cold beer will be just as satisfying in the freezing Antarctic as it is on a hot summer day.

Their beer will get the ultimate test this year when 2000 bottles leave on a ship today for Antarctica, destined for New Zealand’s Scott Base.

Organisers of the shipment say it will be the first craft beer to hit the fridges in the base bar, called The Tatty Flag, which sells mass-produced beer including Tui, Speight’s and Heineken.

What’s most amazing about this is that at just one Antarctic base, nearly 30,000 cans of beer are consumed annually. That seems like an astounding amount of beer for a place for such a remote outpost.  But, I suppose there’s not a lot else to do, and it’s damn cold, so you had might as well drink.

Also interesting are the packaging concerns, because you can’t simply haul the trash to the curb for the garbage men every Tuesday morning.

The beer headed for the base is the first to be bottled in plastic by the company.

The beer has been put in 600ml bottles, designed to be lightweight, reusable and recyclable, because all rubbish is brought back to New Zealand.

They still believe their beer tastes better from glass, but say they will not hesitate to do another plastic run if the need arises.

The specially made labels feature an “Antarctica Edition” logo along with a silhouette of seals and penguins.

It’s a brief publicity stunt, but worthy of a Friday holiday post.

From flickr user grovlam

Lost Abbey brewed up a Wit beer for the fall.  The label features a witch being burned at the stake, a historic and often-replicated piece of imagery.  The New York Times reports:

But one does not have to agree with Ms. Noble’s interpretation of history to share her offense at a picture on the label of Witch’s Wit, a limited-edition pale ale — “wit” means “white” in Dutch — produced by Lost Abbey, a division of the Port Brewing Company of San Marcos, Calif.

It was a painting of a witch being burned at the stake.

Ms. Noble went home and wrote to her e-mail list. “Can we stop this brewer from their hate imagery?” read the subject line, in all capitals.

“Can you imagine them showing a black person being lynched or a Jewish person going to the oven?” she wrote. “Such images are simply not tolerated in our society anymore (thank the Goddess) and this one should not be, either.”

Immediately, friends and followers of Ms. Noble began sending complaints to the brewery.

Actually offensive, or completely ridiculous?

Southern Star Canning (flickr under a CC license)

The Houston Chronicle covers something we’ve covered many times before (and Joe wrote about just this week): microcanning.  They also note the stigma that comes with cans, which I think is the biggest drawback, though many canning breweries would disagree.

Fougeron also believes cans helped differentiate the brand when Southern Star began production two-and-a-half years ago. The brewery is on pace to double production in 2010, he said.

“I attribute some of our success to being in a can,” he said. “It really sets us apart at the retail level.”

…

Wagner said he has no intention of switching to cans because glass maintains a “psychological” edge in the pricier craft segment.

“If people are going to spend eight bucks on a six-pack, they want it in a bottle,” he said. “… We don’t want to put our product in a package that somehow conveys cheap, low-quality beer. There’s no doubt that cans still carry some of that stigma.”

I can see both arguments, and it’s entirely plausible that as canning becomes more popular, the stigma slowly disappears.  But right now, I think the fact that it conveys “cheap” is still a problem for canning, even if it’s not true.

They also provide some helpful numbers:

Cumulatively, sales of craft beer in 12-ounce cans were up 80 percent in the first half of 2010 compared with a year earlier, according to data compiled by marketing analyst SymphonyIRI Group. That compares with 11.2 percent growth in six-pack bottles of comparable size.

Cans still have a long way to go to catch up. In the first half of 2010, craft brewers sold $376.5 million worth of beer in bottles, compared with $2.3 million in cans.

Yet craft brewers — generally smaller, independently owned companies that use premium ingredients and lack the production-scale savings enjoyed by mass-market giants — have been turning to aluminum in greater numbers since Colorado-based Oskar Blues got the can rolling in 2002.

Keep in mind: if you’re reading this and understand why microcanning is, you probably don’t need to be convinced.  But for your casual craft beer fan — for the person who’s looking to try something other than Miller Lite — there’s something to a bottle that people associate with quality.  It may not be right, but for now, it’s reality.

Tuned Pale Ale

Gadget blog Gizmodo caught wind of a now-defunct Tuned Pale Ale, which came in brilliant (and likely very expensive) packaging:

The Tuned Pale Ale’s bottles show a musical scale on its label. Drink it down to the note you want, blow on it, and it will play it back. Buy a pack, and form a band with your friends.

Actually, the pack itself becomes a drumming box, and the bottles’ special washboard shape also serves as percussion source.

While the Tuned Pale Ale was manufactured in a small microbrew batch—to great success, according to designers Matt Braun and Chris Mufalli—it’s not longer in production. Too bad, because this should be the standard for all beers. We need more music in the world.

It’s a mistake to get caught up in the package if the beer is bad, but it’s still a pretty brilliant way to sell your beer. More photos below.

Read the rest of this entry »

NewsObserver.com - CHUCK LIDDY

NewsObserver.com covers a local brewery who’s joining the microcanning trend sweeping from the west coast:

Canning is a much more prominent thing for western breweries, but more and more on the east coast are picking up the practice.  It’s cheaper and more environmentally friendly, but it does have a stigma that comes along with it.  I think most consumers, if they weren’t really thinking about it, would almost always pick up a bottle of something they’ve never had before they’d pick up a can.

With more and more breweries canning their beer, that stigma could easily change.

Miller High Life packagine (Brand New)

Design blog Brand New has the details on a package design overhaul for Miller High Life. I love package design and branding, and the Miller High Life redesign is fantastic (even if the beer is not).

One detail I particuarly love: printing on the back of the bottle lables allows you to arrange the bottles to spell out the High Life slogan.  Design is in the details, and this is one is great:

High Life Bottles

If this kind of thing interests you, check out the post on Brand New.