Holter
Well-Known Member
Back in January 2013 I brewed my first sour beer. Last month I finally got around to bottling it. I had split up the 12 gallons into 2 gallon batches with different fruit added. This is definitely the longest I have ever waited to package a beer so I figured why not actually label it up and take a stab at waxing the bottles.
A few months back I read an article on drinkbelgianbeer.com about old bottles of Cantillon and how they didnt have any labels on them. All the brewery did was wax cork the beers, wax the top and paint a stroke of paint over the front of the bottle. The paint and wax matched colors and identified the contents within as a kriek, where a white cap would have been a geueze. I thought it was a really cool way of labeling a beer so I decided to do an homage to their design. The text on the back alludes to all lambic brewers labeling their bottles this way, and while I believe some of other producers did label their beers this way - the Cantillon bottle was my specific inspiration.
I added the back label and named the beers after the fruit within and color coded all of the bottles to match. I used the wax on the top and the front of the bottles. Here are some pictures:
I used this website to figure out how to adhere the labels to the bottles and followed a lot of the guidance on here regarding waxing the tops. I personally dont really like waxed bottles because they can be a real pain to open, so I decided to keep the wax relatively thin.
One of the problems I ran into was finding a good paper source to print labels that had a texture closer to wine label paper - or for example something like Goose Island's large format bottles - to print onto. The paper I chose was white linen paper I picked up at the office max by my house. It has the textured look i was going for but it doesnt hold up well with cold temperatures (which you can see with the Fraise and Framboise bottles above). So I want to get better paper next time. Either that or next time I am going to have an envelope stamp made that I will use for the front of the label. Ill just drop a big dollop of wax on the front and press the envelope stamp with my logo on it and bypass the front paper altogether.
Anyway I had a lot of fun making the labels. Ill probably end up doing more stuff in the future.
A few months back I read an article on drinkbelgianbeer.com about old bottles of Cantillon and how they didnt have any labels on them. All the brewery did was wax cork the beers, wax the top and paint a stroke of paint over the front of the bottle. The paint and wax matched colors and identified the contents within as a kriek, where a white cap would have been a geueze. I thought it was a really cool way of labeling a beer so I decided to do an homage to their design. The text on the back alludes to all lambic brewers labeling their bottles this way, and while I believe some of other producers did label their beers this way - the Cantillon bottle was my specific inspiration.
I added the back label and named the beers after the fruit within and color coded all of the bottles to match. I used the wax on the top and the front of the bottles. Here are some pictures:
I used this website to figure out how to adhere the labels to the bottles and followed a lot of the guidance on here regarding waxing the tops. I personally dont really like waxed bottles because they can be a real pain to open, so I decided to keep the wax relatively thin.
One of the problems I ran into was finding a good paper source to print labels that had a texture closer to wine label paper - or for example something like Goose Island's large format bottles - to print onto. The paper I chose was white linen paper I picked up at the office max by my house. It has the textured look i was going for but it doesnt hold up well with cold temperatures (which you can see with the Fraise and Framboise bottles above). So I want to get better paper next time. Either that or next time I am going to have an envelope stamp made that I will use for the front of the label. Ill just drop a big dollop of wax on the front and press the envelope stamp with my logo on it and bypass the front paper altogether.
Anyway I had a lot of fun making the labels. Ill probably end up doing more stuff in the future.
