Farm Yard Brew Co.
Location - Lancaster, UK
Year - 2022
Design Credits - Molly Bland
Photo Credits - Farm Yard Brew Co. / Molly Bland
Explore - Farm Yard Brew Co.
Wrapped in yards of tactile textures, down on the farm
Cast your mind back to 2016. At that time Moss Edge Farm, Cockerham, had been in the Holmes family for five generations. Steven was about to become the sixth, but with UK farming in crisis he realised the farm wasn’t sustainable as it stood and diversification was clearly needed. A keen homebrewer (and never someone to do things by half we’re told) it occured to him that brewing could be his, and the farm’s, future. With the help of his parents, friends and the Rural Development Programme, Farm Yard Ales was born.
It’s no understatement to say that the brewery has grown considerably in the intervening 7 years - expanding from 2,000 to 400,000 litres. It also transitioned from Farm Yard Ales to Farm Yard Brew Co in 2022 to better align the branding and name to where the beers had progressed to, and allow for a better representation of the product.
Step in Molly Bland, an illustrator and designer from up the road in Morecambe who undertook a complete rebrand of the breweries core range of beers with great results.
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Skillfully (and thankfully) avoiding any well-worn visual tropes, Molly’s labels are a pure delight of colour, texture and shape and a beatifully abstract way of conveying both the brewery’s rural location and the beers to expect within.
I love that you can pick out and interpret elements of the illustrations for yourself - an ear of corn, a tree-lined hill, harvest moon, hedgerows, trails and maybe even the odd brewery hose?
Elements of the designs translate appealingly onto glassware, tap posters and tshirts which, alongside the simple and bold logo lock up, make for a really bold and brave look for the brewery and one that works so well for me.
Thanks to Farm Yard Brew Co and Molly Bland for the images featured in this blog.
