Beer Face Review: Magic Hat’s Circus Boy
Magic Hat is a happy-go-lucky brewery based in South Burlington, Vermont and those hippies up there really love to mess around with their Beer Faces! Their Faces are all over the map as far as design, color, type and style. If you look at a Face and ask “What the hell am I drinking?”, it’s probably a Magic Hat brew. This adventurous design approach is admirable, whether a noble conscious effort or unconscious acid-tripped night on the ol’ Flower Power iMac. As you can imagine, the results are often disastrous.
A friend brought over a sampler the other week and I was immediately drawn to the Face of their Hefeweizen, Circus Boy. The bottle has 3 labels, two ovular ones one the body and a Magic Hat promo choker on the neck. The face is largely an illustration, with a warm yellow color palette which looks great against the dark brown bottle. The hand-drawn treatment of the beer’s name works well, the near white letters are clear and their strong contrast from the textured background give the title a high level of prominence. The title’s typography is uneven and organic, flowing from the top down around to the right side of the label and illustration. Below we find a ornate circus carriage dubbed “The Hefeweizen!”, wow, what showmanship! This provides the focal point of the label, which is the dark rectangular shape of the hull of the carriage, barred for transporting animals. Kinda looks like a dark bar code though. Hey, something’s reaching out and grabbing the letter “y” in the title! OMG!
Upon closer inspection, we’ve found Circus Boy! His beady white eye are dotted in darkness as he reaches out for help from a life on the road with smelly animals. Nice touch Magic Hat, a subtle clever interpretation of the name. Fun typography, a great color pallette, appropriate illustration and a drugged-out game of “Where’s Weird Waldo?” make this Face a winner. So get yourself out the circus (er, bar) and save this freak (uh, boy) today!
Beer Face Review: Hofbräu Oktoberfest
Taste and the good old-fashioned ability to get you drunk are among the top ways to finding a good beer, but what attracts you to trying a new one? Aesthetics, whether you consciously know it or not, play a big part when you’re selecting an unfamiliar beer to take for a test drink. Checking out the shape of the tap, looking at the graphics on the case in your distributor, or eyeing up the Beer Face (the bottle’s label) all can play a strong role in legitimizing a potential buy. A weak Face makes a beer look like it doesn’t have it’s act together. Lets take a look at the Beer Face of Hofbräu Oktoberfest and see how effective they are in conveying the sense of its storied heritage.
Being based in Munich, the royal Hofbräuhaus brewery was a key beer supplier to the first Oktoberfest of 1810. Two years later, in an attempt to offer King Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria a top-notch brew with some extra alcohol (man, because being a King back then was ROUGH, damn drafty castles), the “Oktoberfestbier” from Hofbräu München was born.
The modern Oktoberfest’s bottle has 3 labels: a rhombus-shaped one on the neck bearing their logo, a rectangular informational one on the back, and the ovular supposed show-stopper on the front. This is the Face, the one that is supposed to envoke “How YOU doin’?” from strangers. The color palette of consists of a royal blue, a warm yellow, gold and white. Set against a green bottle, I’m thinking of skipping through a summer field in Sweden, not a brisk fall night of drunken chanting with my buds. These colors are very strong, but aren’t working. So what’s left?
At the center of the ovular label, is a quant illustration of the Hofbräu tent at Oktoberfest, and a surrounding festival atmosphere incorporating horses and a ferris-wheel. This is their shot at conveying the real “feel” of the Oktoberfest experience through a Bob Ross miniature. Not getting that feeling much it across the bar, and not seeing much more with my magnifying glass.
Comparing this to their regular label for the original brew, let’s see what they did different for the crown jewel of Munich’s great gift to the world, Oktoberfest. Not much except an updated doodle better suited for the napkin your bottle sits on. Inappropriate colors and a lack of realign effort for the label of such a seemingly important authentic German brew. Man, all that drinking around Oktoberfest makes Germans lazy!
Take a look at the Beer Face in your hand. What’s looking good and successfully telling you it’s that time of year to throw some bratwurst on the grill?