Camden Town Brewery - Research and Developments

Brewery History:

In the 90s Jasper Cuppaidge, missed his flight back home to Australia and ended up collecting glasses in a London pub.

After collecting many glasses, and doing a few other jobs on the side, Jasper was driving home one evening when he spotted a ‘For Sale’ sign on a knackered old pub in a great location. He stole the sign.

Jasper called the estate agent’s number on the stolen sign, bought the pub, painted it white and opened it as The Horseshoe in 2006 with the aim of serving good food, wine and beer to the people of Hampstead.

The first batch of beer Jasper brewed was a birthday present for his mum, Patricia, in honour of his granddad, Laurie. Laurie McLaughlin had owned a brewery called McLaughlin’s in Rockhampton, Australia many moons ago and the cask ale Jasper brewed was based on one of his granddad’s old recipes.

Having made that first batch, Jasper decided he liked brewing. So he brewed another, and another, and another. Soon Mac’s beer (which is what he called his granddad’s brew) was constantly on tap at The Horseshoe, and it proved so popular that Jasper started selling it to his mates who owned pubs too.

What Jasper really wanted to make was lager. To do this, he needed a bigger brewery, one that wasn’t in the basement of a pub.

Annoyingly, another brewing company had already trademarked the name Mac’s meaning Jasper needed a new name and a brewery. Inspired by the borough in which he lived, Jasper typed ‘camdentownbrewery.com’ into the search engine. It was free. So he bought it on the spot. 

Shortly after he bought the domain name, whilst out and about wandering around Camden, Jasper spotted some Victorian railway arches being done up underneath Kentish Town West Station. They looked like the perfect place for building a brewery, so Jasper decided to rent five, even though he thought that was way more than he needed.

Fast forward a year and suddenly one becomes three. Jasper buys a big, shiny brew kit, hires a brewer and persuades Joey from The Horseshoe to come join him and do a bit of everything at his new company. Camden Town officially start brewing.

The first batch of lager comes out. We decide to call it Hells as it’s a cross between Helles and Pilsner and is brewed with malt and hops sourced from Germany. We use the same stuff to make Hells today.

Where could this lead? 
What is the current illustration missing?

- Need to think about type and what type to use.
- Adding texture to the piece would be good, thinking about how we want the design to feel, at the moment it is very flat.

Testing Textures:
- Patterns developed using a range of materials.
- Need to be placed over sections of the designs to see the impact.
- Don't over edit, don't want to removed the organic textures within the patterns.

Taking these patterns and layering them over the image to see the impact:

- The texture add more depth to the images, however it hasn't solved the issue of things appearing rather flat.

- The red works well, creates a sense of ambiguity within the characters. Could maybe try and expand the colour palette to include a wider range of bright fun colours.

- Still need to think about the placement of text within these images.

Adding Type:
- Trying to add the work 'fresh' into the design somehow.
- Add type added is very overwhelming, it creates a slightly tense and chaotic atmosphere for the illustrations to be situated in.
- The type could be where the colour comes into play potentially.
- Don't want to make the type the main focus, looking at other designs the majority are image only (need to think about how the print could be taken further to include type when necessary).

Experimentation:
- Got too stuck, needing to become more playful and experiment quickly with what had already been developed.
- Changing the opacity within the layers was interesting, created a new dynamic for the poster.
- Outlining in red instead of black wasn't very effective, it appeared like a laser beam.
- The same overwhelming feel of things being too chaotic was still in place (need to discuss this with Kat).

Discussion with Kat:

• Images appear flat.
• Texture do improve this but could maybe be done physically (Kat mentioned how she feels confident using collage within her work).
• I brought up the colour scheme, when looking at the other prints red is a common coloured used (to tie into the logo). We're going to test the collage with both red only and then more altering shades along a bright colour palette.
• The composition of the image we felt worked well as a print, however as a poster or bottle design it need re-thinking so that type can become included.
• We developed a series of outcomes, 1 print (image only), 1 poster (image and text), 1 beer bottle design (image and text).

Kat:

- Work on developing collage for the illustrations.

Evie:

- Develop a typeface and structure for the poster and bottle label.