Beer Bach

We were approached by the owners of The Mount Pleasant Inn, a family run pub and B&B based in Merthyr Tydfil, to create and develop a brand for a new product they were creating. The pub is steeped in history, so they wanted something that would add to that heritage and form an important part of the family business and the village in which it’s based. The product itself – a refreshing, non-alcoholic ginger beer named Beer Bach – had already been created. In case you didn’t know, in English it means ‘small beer’. Now all they needed was the brand and packaging.

Step 1 – Research

Before the design work started, we did a heck of a lot of research around the drink’s background; getting to grips with the important role it’s played in the history of this small Welsh town. The brand story practically wrote itself – the drink’s authenticity gave us a lot to work with and meant we could develop something that really made the product stand out from its competitors.

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We collected a range of old Welsh materials online in addition to real world objects and research


Step 2 – Branding and packaging

We looked at a number of directions we could take the brand, which resulted in a variety of colour schemes and typeface choices to reflect different moods. But our clients already had something in mind – they really wanted to push a strong heritage brand that would be recognisable as Welsh and reminiscent of the coal mining and iron work era. This they thought would make it really stand out in its market. And they were right.

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We sketched out, scanned and illustrated various styles of colliary wheels


So we developed a wordmark that looked like it could have been crafted from iron, and drew inspiration from the colliary wheels – typical of the South Wales mining area – for an accompanying graphic.

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The final logo


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Having developed the label and packaging for the bottles, we arranged a product shoot to give a good feel for the drink. The client was really happy with the end result and has made a great deal of use of the branding and photography in all their marketing material.

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The final flyer, complete with product photography and brand story


The outcome

The drink has become a fantastic little collector's piece and interest has been outstanding. The Mount Pleasant owners have shipped batches to be sold across Europe and have received wonderful feedback on both the drink and the brand.


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