Our ninth Guinness poster by John Gilroy features a frustrated goldfish who can’t reach a pint of Guinness just outside his fishbowl. Under the “Guinness For Strength” banner, it also uses the curious tagline. “It’s a poor fish that never has a Guinness.”
Whatever your feelings about Newcastle Brown Ale, it is perceived as one of the classic English brown ales and its label is one of the most recognizable.
So I was surprised to see that Newcastle is sponsoring a contest to redesign their iconic label. The contest is known as Your Beer Your Label and gives you two ways to create a new label, either using their online label generator or download a template and have at it with your favorite graphics software (or at least Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop).
The Online Design Tool is actually pretty fun to use and you can do quite a bit of manipulation using it, as evidenced by the many submitted designs.
Unfortunately, the contest ends tomorrow, so if you want to play around or submit your own, you better get cracking.
Though you can still look at the submitted designs and vote for your favorite until the end of March.
Though in the end I wish they were going to do a run of bottles with the winner’s design or, better still, with the top few vote-getters. I think that would have been cool. But instead all the winners get is displayed on Newcastle’s website which seems like a pretty poor payoff for all the effort.
Oh, well, perhaps it’s just as well, as despite some very cool label designs submitted, the label below is currently at the top of the heap with the most votes cast. I guess that either says something about human nature or the demographics of Newcastle drinkers.
Friday’s ad is for Miller High Life featuring the “Girl in the Moon,” which was originally created in the early 1900’s by an unknown artist. The beer itself debuted in 1903 and was advertised with the girl in the moon from the beginning, though to me she looks more like a witch. I think it’s that hat. It’s rumored that the model for her was brewery founder Frederick Miller’s granddaughter. But I’ve always liked the stylized, colorful costume she wears.
And here’s another one featuring her.
Thursday’s ad is for the Spoetzl Brewery, makers of Shiner Bock. Today is their 101st anniversary. This isn’t too old, but I like the concept of it. It has an old-time look and feel to it and it’s part of a larger series that focuses on the actual brewery workers. If you’ve ever been to the actual brewery, it’s a very cool-looking historical brewery in a small Texas town. This one features Richard Hartmann, who’s in shipping and receiving. But it’s the slogan, possibly being attributed to Hartmann, that really makes it for me. “There’s more to life than brewing beer. There’s also drinking beer, talking about beer ….”
To same more, similar ads from a campaign in 2009, see the Behance Network.
Wednesday’s ad is for a presumably short-lived New York City brewery, Brewer’s Best Associates, Inc., which was located at 620 Fifth Avenue. The ad for their Pilsener Beer is from 1947. The normally authoritative American Breweries II doesn’t even have a listing for the brewery, which is odd. It’s the first time I’ve looked up a brewery and it wasn’t listed. Given that I’ve never heard of it and there doesn’t seem to be a record of the brewery, it’s funny that their slogan is all about remembering their name, “The New Big Name in Beer.” I guess it didn’t work out as they’d hoped. The other funny thing in the ad is the endorsement from “Ted Collins, owner of Boston Yanks Pro-Football Team and famous radio producer.” The Boston Yanks were a short-lived team that only played from 1944-47. In 1948, they relocated to New York City and were the New York Bulldogs for a season before becoming the New York Yanks until 1952, when they played their final season in Texas as the Dallas Texans. As for the beer, I guess it wasn’t “the beer you’ve been waiting for” after all.
UPDATE: An alert reader (thanks Beer Dave!) offered some additional information about Brewer’s Best.
Brewers Best was actually not a brewery. This was a franchise of sorts. Brewers Best was brewed at about 25 different small breweries around the US. The headquarters in NY was essentially a sales office. This brand had national distribution through the network of small brewers who brewed the beer under contract.
Tuesday’s ad is for Stag Beer, whose original name was “Kaiser Beer” until 1907. In an effort to avoid growing anti-German sentiment, Star Brewing held a contest to pick a new name. A winner was chosen today in 1907, and the beer was renamed “Stag Beer.” It proved a very popular name. The ad below ran in a Pennsylvania newspaper in 1959. It features the popular UPA cartoon character Mr. Magoo.
Mr. Magoo debuted in 1949 and was voiced by Jim Backus, perhaps most well-known as Thurston Howell III on the television series Gilligan’s Island.
But being a cartoon, where Mr. Magoo really shined was in cartoon commercials for Stag.
You have to love the cartoon of an adult character who’s allowed to act like an adult. That would never happen nowadays.
Here’s an example of one of the Mr. Magoo ads for Stag Beer.
Monday’s ad is for Schlitz Malt Liquor. I don’t ever remember the can looking so, well, stylish so I have to guess this is from the 60s? The pull-top is another clue, of course, as Schlitz introduced what they called the “pop-top” in 1963. Plus the stylized art looks rather bachelor pad circa mid-60s, too. Plus, I love those bold reds and blacks.
Today’s work of art was originally painted around 1790, when the English pub was a very different animal. It was created by Henry Singleton, a British artist who lived from 1766-1839. This painting, The Ale-House Door, is an oil on canvas painting roughly 10 x 12 inches, and the original can be found at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. It’s also sometimes known by the title At the Inn Door.
The pub looks like it was probably called The Bell, though I’m just guessing based on the sign. According to my handy Dictionary of Pub Names, the Bell is a fairly common pub name owing to the idea that a “bell speaks all languages.”
You can read more about Singleton at his Wikipedia page and there’s a biography of him from the Grove Dictionary of Art, too. You can see a few more of his works at the Tate and there are more links at ArtCyclopedia.
The eitgth Guinness poster by John Gilroy is of a Knight in shining armor trying to figure out how to drink through his helmet. The tagline is “Opening Time is Guinness Time,” but it looks more like Knight Time to me.
Because I write for a living, I take it seriously and am always trying to be a better writer. For that reason, I subscribe to several twitter feeds that offer suggestions and advice for writers. One recently linked to an interesting list, the 100 Best First Lines of Novels. Number one, of course, is “Call me Ishmael,” from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. It was fun to see what made the list, but I happened upon a book I’d never heard of with a very cool first line. The book is called The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley, written in 1978.
It made number 85 on the list, with the following first line:
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
One critic described Crumley’s writing as a “cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson,” which puts him in good company as far as I’m concerned. Another account said “The Last Good Kiss has been described as “the most influential crime novel of the last 50 years” and yet I’d never heard of it. I was intrigued enough to order the book.
For the Vintage paperback edition, Rick Lovell, did this great illustration with the alcoholic dog Fireball Roberts lapping up beer from an ashtray in a seedy looking motel. In case you’re curious, the painting on the back wall is La Grande Odalisque by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, the original of which hangs in the Louvre. This could easily be included in my Beer In Art series.