Making lager great again

A small Helsinki brewery is paying an amusing tribute to the upcoming Helsinki summit by issuing a limited edition lager showing President Trump and President Putin on its label with text, "Let's Settle This Like Adults."

Oh? It's not a tribute. It's advertising. Don't you know anything about business?

The beer is in high demand and they've sold out the full 10,000 bottle run ahead of Monday's summit.  Samples have been delivered to U.S. and Russian embassies in Helsinki.

Cute. Well done. Should have made more. Underestimated demand.

That takes a bit of planning. Beer ferments for two weeks. George's and Paul's beer was insufficiently carbonated after two weeks so the place added sugar before bottling for the yeast to consume, just as it's done with Champaign. That added another week. And they do things very scientifically downstairs so that shows us there are variables difficult to account for. Paul reports he thinks the alcohol content is higher due to that because he drank one beer and it made him feel loopy.

He always feels loopy, so a bit more loopy than normal.

Washington Examiner. Who failed to show a photo of the label.

What's wrong with them? Don't you think that's essential?

I went to a BBQ at Paul's house and my beer label making rep preceded me. Everyone there had already seen the trial labels that I showed you here. They were more impressed than you were. They were tickled someone would just zip out over a dozen little pictures. They talked about and voted for the ones they liked best. The little sketches were just toss-off ideas, all rough drafts to get a sense of what Paul might go for, but his guests got a real kick out of them. So now I'm focused on beer labels and Washington Examiner doesn't even think that it's relevant enough to show it.

GAWL!

I'm amazed at what people do with these things. There are so many very fine talented artists out there. You have one chance to create an image for your beer that will be attractive to consumers. It's advertising in a small square. It's such a strange packaging thing, so incidental to the product, yet so important to sales. Beer bottle labels are crucial. They become iconic, as this one will. Something that people save as memento for the event. Something that goes into scrapbooks, or even possibly framed and displayed, if this event was important in their life. And 10,000 is not such a terribly small run. Ten gallons made four cases. That's only 96 bottles. Let's say 100. That makes the run, 1,000 gallons of beer. 960 bottles of beer. Yeah, I guess that is kind of small.

I like their label a lot. This is fantastic.