Bierstadt Lagerhaus Branding

Bier­stadt Lager­haus is a brew­ery in Den­ver. The brew­ers are the very capa­ble Bill Eye (for­mer head brew­er at Dry Dock and owner/brewer at Prost Brew­ing), Ash­leigh Carter (for­mer­ly at Dry Dock & Prost), and Chris Rippe (for­mer­ly of Fly­ing Dog Brew­ery & pro­pri­etor of The Rackhouse).

Visual Branding

Once it was decid­ed that Bill, Ash­leigh and Chris were going to work togeth­er, they came to Fer­mentable Sug­ar to devel­op visu­al brand­ing. The direc­tion of the mark was already some­what decid­ed, but the time had come to bring in a pro­fes­sion­al com­pa­ny with pre­vi­ous brew­ery expe­ri­ence to take their idea and turn it into a func­tion­al brand iden­ti­ty. Bill, Chris & Ash­leigh were set on an art Deco feel to brand their brew­ery, which had recent­ly pur­chased a 1930s Ger­man brew­house that was cut out of its pre­vi­ous loca­tion and shipped to Den­ver. In the course of about a month, we took a con­cept and per­formed a series of rounds of design to end up with a final mark. The brand­ing fea­tures the Den­ver sky­line (with a touch of Munich, an homage to their roots as a Ger­man lager brew­ery), and an art deco badge that hous­es the BIERSTADT lettering.

Giv­en that there is a lot of black on the edges of the mark, a reverse logo was need­ed for dark back­grounds. The essen­tial ele­ments are the same, but there is a lot of con­trast in the reverse grayscale logo.

Devel­oped as a grayscale mark, The Bier­stadt Lager­haus brand­ing excels as a 1‑color mark. It’s dif­fi­cult to con­dense a brand that uses 5 val­ues of black into a 1‑color brand. This logo will be used for things like silkscreen­ing (when the client doesn’t want to print a logo with 5 dif­fer­ent gray spot colors).

The reverse of the 1‑color brand­ing is just as visu­al­ly appeal­ing and stands out so well on dark backgrounds.