End of the Road for the Low Mile

It was always the plan to grow organically - to us, this means: work with what we’ve got, stay within our means, remain independent. On the whole, this meant that we were very much a local brewery servicing the businesses and communities along the South Coast and up to London.

We’ve always sold some beer to trade further afield, but this area of the South East has been our playground for the last five years or so. 

Of course, we’ve always had ambitions to become nationally recognised. We love the idea of Shaka - a beer born in our tiny Brighton brewpub, the Hand in Hand - being enjoyed in Manchester and Glasgow and Cardiff and everywhere else; and recently, we’ve had a bit of a gear change. 

Head Brewer Kate is now also Product Director and is leading the charge with exciting collaborations all over the country with brewers we truly admire (like Elusive, Hackney Church, Round Corner, Downlands, Closet, Up Front, Hanging Bat, BRZN), as well as guesting on numerous podcasts and panels. 

And now our beer is being sipped everywhere.

As we become better known, we wanted to look at our product portfolio and our brand plan a little closer. Is it complete? Does it make sense? We’ve done a few tweaks over the years which I feel has edged us closer to cohesion, but are we there yet?

There’s always a battle inside a brand between consistency in order to create confidence and staying fresh in order to be relevant. There has to be a way for a brand to do both. 

Being in brand, design and comms for most of my life, I can’t remember how many brand ‘tweaks’, ‘refreshes’ or ‘rebrands’ I’ve been part of. Some of them were purposeful and exciting, some meaningless and chaotic, and some were simply unnecessary ego trips for new board members, but all of them had the same questions - is this the right thing to do? Is this the right time to do it? How will our customers feel about it? Will we lose share of voice, or will this expand it? 

For us, being so small, there’s also: will anybody really care? And: am I overthinking this? 

I always think it’s worth sweating the small stuff, so I’m ok overthinking it.

Of course, when you’ve got piles of cash, a lot of these questions can be answered by good old fashioned market research (and probably ai), but we’re still paying with our gut-feel (and a bit of our own experience).

So why am I talking about this?

Well, it’s because we’re rebranding two of our core range beers - 795 and High 5.

It feels quite extreme, maybe. These two beers being in our core range means they’re customer favourites, but it feels like if we’re going to make changes, now is the right time - before our sales expand further across the country.

As you may know, many of our beers started off with names associated with hand gestures, signs and signals (I talk about naming beers in this blog) and High 5 fits with that original idea. 795 doesn’t fit with that at all, but it was excused because it was at least short and abstract, which is our new naming convention.

Whilst High 5 is a great name, it feels part of our old world - hand gestures - and doesn’t quite gel with our new approach. But it doesn’t make much sense in beer terms either. Its abv is 4.6%. Neither of those numbers are 5. We speak about high and low abvs, so the ‘high’ doesn’t work in that sense either. I guess it would work if we had a beer called High 5 and it was, say, 5.8% abv. That would work.

Sidenote: did you know that high fives were ‘invented’ in 1977 and added to the OED in 1980? Nuts but true, look here.

795 is essentially a project name. Once upon a time, we had a lovely lager called Yuba, but we wanted to make a better lager with ingredients sourced closer to home. We did! And the distance the ingredients travelled was 80% fewer than Yuba’s ingredients - 795 miles to be precise. 

That really worked as a name for a project beer, but we feel the project is now over. We’ve done that; the message has been sent. 795 is completely embedded into our core range and as such, it needs to fit properly. It’s not an outsider anymore; it’s part of the family.

So it’s time to rethink these names. Drum roll…

795 - Low Mile Lager will now be known as: Pocko - Original Lager. And as I threatened at the end of this blog, in terms of the artwork, we’re zooming back out of the space hole so you can see where the 795 ladder was this whole time. 

Pocko is a bastardisation of the Czech word spoko, which means chill out/calm down. I wanted something with a similar meaning to shaka but from the Pilsen area where this style of lager originates. So this did it for me. 

Shaka Original Pale and Pocko Original Lager work well together.

The urban dictionary says pocko means “a ship name between two people who are extremely weird and really close with each other”. Being the big pun fan I am, portmanteaus are right up my street, so I’m happy with that, and it’s also slang for pocket apparently (which you put your hands in, so you know… it’s still hand related).

And what about High 5? Drum roll…

High 5 will now be known as: Tatchi. Tatchi is Japanese for touch. We really loved the sound of this word and to remain close to the idea of the high fives and hands is a bonus. Obviously, our Cask Oat Pale isn’t related in any way to Japan or the Japanese language, but luckily, there is a reference to Tokyo on the wiki page about high fives, here. 

We’re sticking with the artwork for this one, so it’s just the name change.

So there you have it - Pocko and Tatchi, welcome to the family. I’m a happy chappy, as to appease my neurosis on the matter, both of these new names fit perfectly in our naming convention - short, abstract, easy to say, easy to hear at the bar, unnecessary to understand.

I should mention after all this that the beers themselves are exactly the same as they were before - we haven’t changed a drop.

You will notice that we’ve also introduced a new primary typeface. We really love Jamie Clark’s Rig Solid fonts, which is what we’ve used for years, but it was time for a little refresh on these. 

After searching and testing for a few months, I landed on a typeface called Costa by James Coffman. He says “Costa is a hand-drawn typeface loosely based on painted signs and type found in coastal Mexican villages, invoking a dry sun-baked aesthetic”. Great! 

What I really like about it, aside from its weight, is how characterful it is. Characterful to the point that each letter seems to have its own identity. When you look at the product lineup together, the names seem to stretch and contract on the page, like a dance. It’s dynamic.

It feels like a good match.

The new typeface works really well on our labels, badges and website, including on our new specials design. A lot of our specials this year will be at other breweries, but the specials brewed at ours will have the new design, which uses a close up of our hand logo created by illustrator Joni Marriott. 

We always do a new design for specials each year, but I think this year's design is my favourite so far. Check out the Kindred badge - a Copper Mild we did with Round Corner Brewing.

It feels good to update the brand. It can get addictive poking, prodding and fiddling with all the elements, but I think this set-up will last us a few years, which means that our look and feel is now part of a really stable platform to support our brand as we grow.