We created the brand identity and packaging for Good Things Brewing, a new Sussex-based company with the goal of building the world’s most sustainable brewery. The company target is to be completely energy efficient, off-grid with everything recycled and reused — from water to grain.
The founder and creative lead of Good Things Brewing Co., Sam Robinson, said, “The way beer is brewed is really inefficient. And in the UK, we brew a lot of beer. A lot. Raw ingredients are shipped in from all over the world, leftover grain is recycled inefficiently, and huge amounts of energy and water are wasted. Our planet simply can’t sustain it.”
Sam was inspired to create the brand after learning about the environmental impact of the beer-making process and the lack of public knowledge of this outside the brewing industry. Even the brewery’s spent grain is dried and milled so that it can be reused to make flour. Sam commented, “We’ve designed the world’s first low-energy, large-scale, solar-powered dehydrator to dry and mill our spent grain. We then mill it using a traditional stone mill to produce incredible wholemeal flour, putting this otherwise wasted ingredient to deliciously good use.”
On the visual identity, Sam goes on to explain, “It was important that our branding break the traditional craft beer aesthetic. We crucially wanted to move away from the ‘skater’ graphics and boys’ club feeling, and create something more closely linked to the natural world, importantly appealing to both men and women.”
In answer to the brief, we created a core icon that conveys the brand’s products, combined with a feeling of nature and peace. A linear, graphically styled bird, whose tail feathers mimic an ear of barley, is used boldly across each of the variants. This is paired with a soft colour palette on a textured matt paper label for a natural and tactile feeling in the hand.
As part of the brand’s offer to spread the good word, Good Things Brewing also creates bespoke brews for other brands or events. So an important part of our task when considering the packaging and branding was how to give the collaborative edition cans their own personality, whilst still being clearly identifiable as part of the Good Things brand. The solution is a double faced can, one side of which is dedicated to an icon that represents the third-party brand or event.
We considered the brand holistically, ensuring they tell their story in a way that’s as sustainable as possible. Wooden bar pump badges give a unique and natural look in bars, and the brand book is single colour, printed by Chris Chadbon Printing on recycled paper using vegetable-based ink and an eco-printing press.
And whilst fully recyclable, we hope the beautiful monochromatic design encourages readers to spread Good Things and pass it on.
We brought to life some rather startling statistics in the illustrative brand deck, such as, “It takes 94 trees a day to absorb the carbon footprint of just one pint, and the UK beer industry produces 2.16 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. That’s like driving a double-decker bus around the world 108,121 times.” Good reason enough to make some big changes to the brewing industry.
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