Captain Damage
Well-Known Member
But Captain, why should I label my beers when Im the only one who drinks them?
Im glad you asked Jimmy. First off, you probably aren't really the only one who drinks them, and if you are, you shouldn't be. Sharing homebrew is one of the great joys of brewing! Even if you live alone, you have friends and family you see from time to time and colleagues at work. Few of the people who know that you homebrew will never express some interest in tasting some. Additionally, there are local homebrewing clubs; national and local competitions. There are podcasters and bloggers who will gladly accept beers from you. You can even find BJCP judges who will evaluate your beer outside of competition.
If youve truly never offered any of these people your beer, I have to ask why not? Are you embarrassed by your beer? There are ways to fix that! But if, as I suspect, you really just mean you drink most of the beers you make, then I strongly encourage you to label your beers or at the very minimum, have labels handy to apply for the times when you do give your beer to others.
While its simplistic to say we taste with our eyes, it is true that we use senses other than just smell and taste when we drink a beer. We listen to the pssht when the bottle is uncapped; we see the color and turbidity; we feel how fast the alcohol goes to our head. We also notice if the packaging looks slick, not necessarily professional, but carefully done with pride or maybe theres just a couple of hard-to-decipher initials hastily scrawled on the cap with a Sharpie. All of these things factor into the beer drinking and evaluating experience. Labeled homebrew will not just impress your friends, it becomes a brand that you work for, that you take pride in and work to improve.
How to make labeling easy
Come up with a theme, and let your brand and names flow from there. Theme-branding necessarily limits your creative possibilities, but thats actually a good thing. When you can name your beer anything, its often easier to simply not decide and wind up naming it nothing at all, and continue just scrawling initials on the caps with a Sharpie. So come up with a theme. What do you like (besides brewing beer)? Do you like working on cars? Brake Shop Brewery; High Octane IIPA; Motor Oil Porter; GTO Stout; How about baseball? Left Field Lager. Or fishing? Big Mouth Bock. What do you do for a living? You can tease fun names out of any theme you pick.
If youre even slightly artistically inclined, basic label design is pretty easy. If you dont have Photoshop or any other image editing software, use Google to find a free or low cost one. Your all-in-one printer has a scanner that will allow you to import anything you can draw by hand. For the less artistically inclined, do Google searches for things like free label design, and free logo maker. You could have a friend or colleague design your labels (in exchange for some beer, of course). Or you can even have one of your children do it!
Many of my "Klingon beer" labels follow a common theme>
Printing your labels.
Looking through the ads in brewing magazines there are a number of services that will print and cut labels for you. Youll have to decide if the cost is worth it to you. Many of us will prefer to print at home or the office. If you consider the printable area on a standard letter size sheet of paper is about 8 x 10.5 inches (different printers will have different areas), this easily divides into six rectangular labels 4 x 3.5 inches each. You can make your labels smaller or larger if you want, so that youll have more or less than 6 on a page, but for my rectangular labels I prefer to go 6-up.
Although round or irregular shaped labels look great, they are much harder to cut out at home than rectangular ones. An easy alternative to rectangular labels is to make diamond-shaped labels of 2.5 inches square each. You can fit 12 on a letter-sized page. They will be 3.53 inches on the diagonal and so will still appear to take up most of the usable space on the bottle. See my example at the bottom of this post.
6-up rectangular and 12-up diamond labels, both on standard 8.5 x 11 paper
The problem with printing your labels at home is that ink-jet printer ink tends to bleed when it gets wet. If you have access to a color laser printer youre golden, but these are a pretty hefty expense just for printing beer labels a dozen or so times per year. I get mine printed on the color copier at my local office supply store. I print out a high quality, glossy 6-up page at home and have color copies made at 50¢ per page. I cut them out at home and glue them on with glue stick. Some brewers glue their labels on with milk (no, it wont go sour or get stinky). Either one will come off easily in warm water. I strongly recommend against printing labels on self adhesive paper. They are a nightmare to remove, even the removable ones.
Full-wrap neckbands are too much of a headache to deal with. So instead of a neckband, make diamond shaped medallions of 0.75 - 1.25 inches square each.
Honestly, designing these labels only took about 30 minutes.
Im glad you asked Jimmy. First off, you probably aren't really the only one who drinks them, and if you are, you shouldn't be. Sharing homebrew is one of the great joys of brewing! Even if you live alone, you have friends and family you see from time to time and colleagues at work. Few of the people who know that you homebrew will never express some interest in tasting some. Additionally, there are local homebrewing clubs; national and local competitions. There are podcasters and bloggers who will gladly accept beers from you. You can even find BJCP judges who will evaluate your beer outside of competition.
If youve truly never offered any of these people your beer, I have to ask why not? Are you embarrassed by your beer? There are ways to fix that! But if, as I suspect, you really just mean you drink most of the beers you make, then I strongly encourage you to label your beers or at the very minimum, have labels handy to apply for the times when you do give your beer to others.
While its simplistic to say we taste with our eyes, it is true that we use senses other than just smell and taste when we drink a beer. We listen to the pssht when the bottle is uncapped; we see the color and turbidity; we feel how fast the alcohol goes to our head. We also notice if the packaging looks slick, not necessarily professional, but carefully done with pride or maybe theres just a couple of hard-to-decipher initials hastily scrawled on the cap with a Sharpie. All of these things factor into the beer drinking and evaluating experience. Labeled homebrew will not just impress your friends, it becomes a brand that you work for, that you take pride in and work to improve.
How to make labeling easy
Come up with a theme, and let your brand and names flow from there. Theme-branding necessarily limits your creative possibilities, but thats actually a good thing. When you can name your beer anything, its often easier to simply not decide and wind up naming it nothing at all, and continue just scrawling initials on the caps with a Sharpie. So come up with a theme. What do you like (besides brewing beer)? Do you like working on cars? Brake Shop Brewery; High Octane IIPA; Motor Oil Porter; GTO Stout; How about baseball? Left Field Lager. Or fishing? Big Mouth Bock. What do you do for a living? You can tease fun names out of any theme you pick.
If youre even slightly artistically inclined, basic label design is pretty easy. If you dont have Photoshop or any other image editing software, use Google to find a free or low cost one. Your all-in-one printer has a scanner that will allow you to import anything you can draw by hand. For the less artistically inclined, do Google searches for things like free label design, and free logo maker. You could have a friend or colleague design your labels (in exchange for some beer, of course). Or you can even have one of your children do it!
Many of my "Klingon beer" labels follow a common theme>
Printing your labels.
Looking through the ads in brewing magazines there are a number of services that will print and cut labels for you. Youll have to decide if the cost is worth it to you. Many of us will prefer to print at home or the office. If you consider the printable area on a standard letter size sheet of paper is about 8 x 10.5 inches (different printers will have different areas), this easily divides into six rectangular labels 4 x 3.5 inches each. You can make your labels smaller or larger if you want, so that youll have more or less than 6 on a page, but for my rectangular labels I prefer to go 6-up.
Although round or irregular shaped labels look great, they are much harder to cut out at home than rectangular ones. An easy alternative to rectangular labels is to make diamond-shaped labels of 2.5 inches square each. You can fit 12 on a letter-sized page. They will be 3.53 inches on the diagonal and so will still appear to take up most of the usable space on the bottle. See my example at the bottom of this post.
6-up rectangular and 12-up diamond labels, both on standard 8.5 x 11 paper
The problem with printing your labels at home is that ink-jet printer ink tends to bleed when it gets wet. If you have access to a color laser printer youre golden, but these are a pretty hefty expense just for printing beer labels a dozen or so times per year. I get mine printed on the color copier at my local office supply store. I print out a high quality, glossy 6-up page at home and have color copies made at 50¢ per page. I cut them out at home and glue them on with glue stick. Some brewers glue their labels on with milk (no, it wont go sour or get stinky). Either one will come off easily in warm water. I strongly recommend against printing labels on self adhesive paper. They are a nightmare to remove, even the removable ones.
Full-wrap neckbands are too much of a headache to deal with. So instead of a neckband, make diamond shaped medallions of 0.75 - 1.25 inches square each.
Honestly, designing these labels only took about 30 minutes.
