Over the next several months we will doing a series of postings about the design of our new Easter seasonal, Bad Egg.
Our plan for Bad Egg is to make a proper best bitter, with a target abv of 4.1%. By "proper" best bitter, we mean we are heading for something darker than our current best bitter offering, Humpty Dumpty Ale (though we have no plans to discontinue this beer). Also a little more up front on the hoppiness, possibly involving some dry hop in the firkin.
We are going to post a series of articles on the design of a beer. How we go about it; how we scale it up. And with this first posting, about the design of the new livery.
The story is told in full from the artist's perspective over at illustrator James "Doodling Jim" Browne's website. We found his site by Googling on UK illustrators, and as Jim notes, with the biker motif in mind we were taken by the rough starting point of one of his t-shirt designs.
We wanted something a little different; a little more raw, and something "Humpty off the wall", taking as a starting point the darker side of our brewery name. While to some, "bad egg" may have negative connotations - either of odour, or more colloquially of character, we thought we could riff playfully on his "bad" image as a bit of a devil-may-care biker. Jim had the idea of putting the name on the knuckles, which we think is a perfect touch.
You can see how he evolved over at Jim's site. We love the final result and think it will look great on the handpump. We've talked with Jim about a follow-on, but Bad Egg will keep us busy enough for now.
We've started designing this beer, so keep your eyes on our website for updates on what we're after and how things are progressing - we'll try to post about once a week. We hope to have Bad Egg in pubs from around early March.
