They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover.
But a beer? Northwest Ohio's craft brewers are counting on it.
“It’s a pretty neat thing when you go to a place that has a lot of beer selection. You'll notice a huge variety of beer labels, and it is something that craft beer people look to,” said Scot Yarnell, brewer and owner of the downtown Earnest Brew Works location at 25 S. St. Clair St., Toledo. “They want a unique beer, flavor wise, and they also want a beer that has a unique look to it.”
Andy Parish, co-owner of Great Black Swamp Brewing Company at 2250 Tedrow Rd., Toledo, thinks about labels similarly.
“I think it shows a little bit of the personality of each brewery,” Parish said. “That’s how they recognize themselves, that’s how they distinguish themselves from everybody. Either from their artwork or the flavor of the beer or the craft of the beer behind the label.”
Building a successful brewery comes down to quality, consistency, and marketing, said Shannon Mohr, a board member of the Toledo Metropolitan Craft Brewers Alliance, a new charitable organization for local craft breweries in northwest Ohio. And labels — whether hand-painted, new age, or classically straightforward — play a key role in the last.
“Obviously quality of product is number one, quality and consistency in what you’re making. But beyond that I think there is an important aspect behind your marketing and behind your messaging to consumers,” Mohr said. “In Toledo we have a really, really good consumer base, we have a very knowledgeable consumer base, so they expect a lot.”
The Toledo Metropolitan Craft Brewers Alliance, internally nicknamed the MET CBA, offers protection, promotion, and growth opportunities to local breweries including Toledo’s Earnest Brew Works.
Mohr said consumers are more often drawn to distinctive designs when it comes to craft beer labels, given the competition from more than 40 area breweries that stock the shelves of stores across Ohio.
“You walk up and down a beer aisle, whether it’s in a craft beer store or your grocery store, and there are so many options. So it’s a matter of what do we start with and how do we have something on the shelf that grabs your eye,” Mohr said. “It takes a really good creative team to make something unique.”
Whether they outsource artists or design from within the company, local breweries tout their own unique styles and branding to promote the specialty brews inside.
At the newly opened Quenched and Tempered, located 1210 Jackson St., Toledo, labels are designed very close to home. They feature hand-painted or digitally drawn artwork by co-owner Ali Drozdowicz.
“My husband is the one who is the brewer and started the brewery and so it just was natural; we’re married, I’m an artist,” she said. “For us to pair those things together, it just made a lot of sense.”
Drozdowicz recently hosted a paint and sip, inviting visitors to design their own version of a label for the brewery's newest beer: a peach hefeweizen called Funky Navel.
While Great Black Swamp Brewing Company and Earnest Brew Works have not hosted a design workshop or similar events, both breweries try to work with community members as much as possible. Earnest Brew Works's newest labels are metallic, and Yarnell said local sourcing has been a must.
“Grace Imaging, they’re local, and actually the owner of the company, Bob, was a customer at Earnest,” Yarnell said. “We work with them directly now; it’s a nice relationship.”
Over at Great Black Swamp Brewing Company, the team tries to uphold the product and business standards set by Dr. Robert Morris, or Dr. Bob, who helped start the business in 2009. Great Black Swamp opened a new location with a fully functional tap room and brewery in 2022.
“It’s been unbelievable, just absolutely amazing to finally have the brewery and the tap room together in one location,” Parish said. “The market was shifting. We needed to have the brewery and tap room together. People want to see it, smell it, taste it, touch it, feel it.”
On top of opening a new location, Great Black Swamp Brewing Company has been working on new beers and label designs, including plans for collaborations with other small brewers.
“We want to do a reach-out to the home brewers to be able to work with us. They could brew a beer with us and in turn be able to get one of their beers labeled, and we can do a partnership as long as it’s done in the brewery, legally,” Parish said.
According to Parish, Great Black Swamp Brewing Company primarily uses local designer and artist Alex Dartt for their modern, simple designs.
“A lot of the beer logos have changed over the years. They’ve gone from really, really outlandish and giant pieces of art, and we wanted to kind of come back to more of a simple design for our logos and labels,” Parish said.
Back at Earnest Brew Works, Yarnell says that they work with artist and teacher Jason Sanderson the most, but make an effort to source from multiple designers.
“We have such a variety. We also use a graphic artist to design some of our labels,” Yarnell said. “There’s definitely a certain look to them to keep it uniform, like a lot of products do, but then we also have some ones that are made from hand-drawn art.”
Drozdowicz at Quenched and Tempered likes to utilize her husband’s poetry or a funny play on words in her pieces. For her, picking a favorite label comes down to the story behind the art, the name of the beer, and the beer’s flavor itself.
“Oaty McOatface is one of my favorites. Oaty McOatface came from Boaty McBoatface which was the social media winner of some poll to name an arctic research vessel,” Drozdowicz said, referring to the poll conducted by a British government agency in 2016. “My husband loved that story, so when he had his oatmeal stout he was like I’m going to name it Oaty McOatface, and it’s gonna be the story of this old sea admiral.”
Her label, accordingly, pictures a scraggly, mustachioed sea admiral, dressed in full attire and posing before a deep blue sea.
For newer craft beer businesses like Quenched and Tempered, building a face is just as important as establishing a name. Drozdowicz says their look and namesake were inspired by her and her husband’s love for local craftsmanship.
“For us at Quenched and Tempered, we love craftsmanship, you know, it’s our whole brand,” Drozdowicz said. “We try to pull as much stuff into this space as possible. We use local craftsmen; almost everything here is handmade by local people.”
Mohr, of the regional alliance, said the local focus is what makes breweries in Toledo so special, boosting the economy and bringing outside craft beer enthusiasts into the area.
She said that the Toledo Metropolitan Craft Brewers Alliance can offer a platform for spreading the word on Toledo’s local craft beer specialties.
“We want to make sure that everyone knows that all these different pockets of the state of Ohio have these great breweries,” Mohr said. “So it’s important that we have our own standalone body that can help get our messaging out there, so people in Cincinnati can say, ‘Holy cow, did you guys ever go up to northwest Ohio? There’s so much going on up there.’”
Local design and local beer for local people is the mission of many Toledo craft breweries, including Great Black Swamp Brewing Company.
“Being born in Toledo and brewing beer in Toledo is not just one of our mantras, but it is the truth,” Parish said. “I’m from the south end [of Toledo] and being able to come back to the south end after all of these years and open a brewery here, and then being able to re-introduce the branding for what Dr. Bob has worked so hard for years and years to turn into something like this, really makes you feel good to pass it on to that next generation.”
Contact Shayleigh Frank at sfrank@theblade.com.
First Published October 29, 2022, 1:00 p.m.
