My Crescent Moon Label

I have to admit that I've been slacking on making labels for my home brew.  I heard someone mention on a blog somewhere that they give names to the good brews, and leave the bad ones nameless (or just refer to them by their style).  I think that's a great policy for labeling too, since it saves a lot of work.  Why go to all the effort of designing a label, and affixing it to all of those bottles, for a brew that's mediocre?

In this case, I really like the Blue Moon clone I brewed up recently, so I've decided to whip up a label for it.  See below:

I kinda like it.  Simple and to the point.  Any opinions?  Anyone have suggestions, or ideas for a different label?

Labeling your brew (pt 2 of 2)

This is the second half of my brief labeling primer.  I'm by no means a labeling pro, but I decided that there is far to little information out there about labeling brew.  So without further delay:

Label Design Continued:



Once you find the image you like, you'll need to tap into that latent artistic talent.  Resize/stretch/crop it until it fits into your label dimensions.  After it's the right size, paste it into the new image you created and enhance it to fit your liking.  Add borders, motion blurs, camera flares, embossed logos, whatever you like.  I even added a picture of my own face to one of my wine bottles.  Some people I know called it my "Stalin Wine" because it looked like I placed an image of Stalin's face on it.  I don't look that much like an evil dictator do I?



Add clearly visible text to your label.  I usually consider a name the bare minimum.  You might want to also include the alcohol content, date (or a year for wines), and any other useful info.  Listing any special deviations from your recipe, or a batch ID might help you remember why this brew tastes better or worse than the others when you try it 6 months later.  If your text is hard to see on your background change the color, or even add a border around it from a color on the opposite side of the color wheel.  Again, you'll need some familiarity with your image editor.  When done, save your image.



Printing and cutting:


Create a new image roughly the size of a piece of paper (8.5x11 inches) and copy/paste your saved label-image into the new image as many times as it will fit.  This will help you save time and paper. I can usually fit at least 4 labels on a sheet, and for beer labels sometimes 6 or more.  Decide how many bottles you need labels for, and print out enough sheets to meet your needs.  I recommend laser printers for your labels.  Ink from ink jet printers tends to bleed and get messy when it's wet (and it'll probably get wet at some point, but if you put the labels on AFTER you bottle, there's less risk of that).  Laser toner tends to be more resistant to that type of abuse.  If you're really really worried about your labels bleeding when wet, you can purchase water resistant paper to aid in your cause.  I personally don't go quite that far.


Cut your labels down to size.  This is actually very time consuming to do well.  Having a commercial paper cutter really comes in handy at this point, but you can get by just as well with scissors.  Try to be consistent from label to label.  Make sure your cuts are straight and that the sides match.  It often looks good if you leave a small border of the white paper around your image.  Whether it looks good, and whether you want to do that is up to you and might depend heavily on the image you used.  Stack your final labels into a pile and save them for later.


Attaching the labels:



Make sure you've bottled your brew before placing labels on it.  For wine, I let the wine sit for a few days, giving the cork a chance to seal, before I jostle it around during labeling.  Wash the outside of your bottles.  Yes, I know you washed and sterilized them before you brewed, but you'd be surprised at how much of your brew accidentally ends up on the outside of your bottles unnoticed during bottling.  Let your bottles dry and get your labels ready.


I've tried several different glues and methods, but in the end I always come back to glue sticks.  A purple one gets me through about 15-20 labels.  Also, with glue sticks (especially the purple ones meant for school), the adhesive removes easily after being soaked for a while in water.  Elmers glue, spray on glue, and several other ideas were either too messy, caused too many crinkles in the paper, or just didn't stick good enough.  At one point I found a "roll-on" glue at walmart that I really liked, but I haven't been able to find it again.


Prep your bottle labeling area.  Get your labels and bottles all lined up nearby and at the ready.   Place a large piece of cardboard or some thick heavy paper on the table.  The cardboard will protect your table from getting glued.  Place the label face-down on the cardboard, and apply your glue.  I like to coat a large heavy outline around the border and leave the center clean, so I can handle it without getting too sticky.  Line up your label on the bottle and stick it on.  Some glues (glue sticks aren't too great for this) will have some "give" to them after you stick the label on, so you can move it around a bit while the glue is still wet.  You mostly want to focus on making sure your label is lined up correctly, and smooth out any wrinkles.  Try to place the labels consistently from bottle to bottle as well.



I'm terrible at this part of the labeling.  I get impatient after a few bottles and just start slapping them on without regard to straightness.  The end product looks terrible and often skewed when I don't pay attention to detail.  If you want to get really meticulous, i've found an article with instructions to create your own bottle labeling jig.  I might actually do something like that later on, since seeing my labels all lopsided is kind of irritating.


Appendix - AKA other useful info:



Regular Sam Adams bottles are almost identical to the bottles I use except they are 1/8 inch taller and have "Sam Adams" embossed into the glass.  Since they're similar in size and shape to my own bottles I decided to compare their labels to mine.  Their main label is not a solid rectangle, it's almost like a rectangle with a large oval in the middle.  Their label is 4.5 inches wide.  A massive 2 inches wider than mine, but interestingly, their main viewable logo in the center is almost the same size as mine.  They use the extra 1 inch of space on each side to print all sorts of info like bar codes, manufacturer info, born on dates, and surgeon general's warnings.
I might incorporate something like that into a future label design.  The Sam Adams label is roughly the same height as mine at 3.5 inches.  However 1/4 inch at the top and another 1/4 inch at the bottom mostly serve as a border.


Another important difference, is that Sam Adams includes a label around the neck of the bottle.  The label wraps completely around the neck of the bottle.  I measured this label too, in case anyone wants to design their own neck label.  When unwrapped, it runs 4 inches wide at the top, and 4.5 inches wide at the bottom (to form a cone shape when wrapped).  The neck label is 1.25 inches high, but again, they use some of it as border.  This might be another good place to put extra information about the brew, clever quotes, propaganda, or whatever you want.

Labeling your brew (pt 1 of 2)

Some people may have noticed that I too suffer from BADD (Brewing Attention Deficit Disorder, renamed from the ABDD reference in Kicker's previous article).  I started on the apple cider brew, and well, it hasn't moved much further along than being racked into the secondary fermenter.  Rest assured that it's still alive and awaiting bottling and blogging.

In the meantime... I decided to put together a quick primer on custom labeling for beer and wine bottles.  I know labels are not a glamorous topic.  You might think "hey, I know what I brewed, and I know what it tastes like, so who cares what the bottle looks like?"  Well, three reasons I can think of:

1. Identification.  You and everyone else know what brew is in the bottle you're drinking, and any other pertinent info you decided to include on the label such as alcohol content, batch number (especially handy if you're trying small variations on a recipe), and age (signified by the date brewed, the year the grains/fruits were harvested, or date bottled).  You can go into as much, or as little detail as you like.  Some commercial beers (such as Rolling Rock) include ingredient lists on their labels.  Many commercial wines tell you where the fruit was grown and harvested.

2. Presentation.  I don't know about you, but I like the brew I give out to my friends and family to show a bit of my character.  A good label adds polish to the final look of the brew.  In addition, those who haven't tasted homebrew before will be naturally squeemish, and more-so if it's just some dirty old bottle with no label.  You don't want your mother-in-law guessing what's in the bottle or she'll assume it's moonshine and bound to make her go blind.

3. Fun.  I like making my own labels.  The whole process makes for an interesting side-hobby.  Making labels look better than a scribbled post-it note can present some odd challenges.  There are several processes that come together to make it unique.  When making labels, I find that I'm measuring, designing, printing, cutting, gluing, and finally aligning and attaching.  If I were to get really serious there could even be some woodworking involved, though I've never gone that far.  When I'm done placing the labels on the bottles, I definitely feel a sense of pride and accomplishment.


Getting started:

Your very first step is to remove any previous labels and adhesive on your bottles.  You should be sterilizing the bottles before you put your brew in them, so that's the most convenient time to remove the old labels.  You can also remove labels after you've already bottled your brew, but I find it easier to knock out this step during the sterilization phase.  I hear just about any bottle sterilizing solution works great for removing paper labels and that gummy adhesive.  Soak the bottles overnight and scrub clean.  If you're trying to take the printed labels off of Corona bottles you'll need a strong acid solution like Star San.  I've also heard (and tried) a white vinegar solution with water (I mixed about 50/50, there are suggestions that you can go as low as 10% with the white vinegar.  Over time (like a couple of days) the acidic solution breaks down the clear coat on the printed labels and leaves the paint vulnerable to vigorous scrubbing.  However, I've never been able to get the printed labels completely removed, as you can still see a ghost of them on the bottle.  I'm open to suggestions on getting those Corona bottles crystal clear.

For the purposes of this article I'm going to assume you want to make your own labels.  I am aware that you can buy pre-made labels.  Some wine kits may also come with their own labels.  Use them if you like them.  I don't really see anything wrong with them, but I like my brews to have a personal touch to them.

Measuring:

You'll need to come up with a proper label size, so measure your bottles.  I could tell you what measurements to use, but I don't know how big of a bottle you are using.  Bottle sizes vary.  I find that the viewable width is about 1/3 of the circumference of the bottle.  For my cheap old 12oz beer bottles that means 2.5 inches wide.  You don't want them too wide or you'll have to move the bottle around to see what the whole label says.  Height is a little tricky and even with some measurements you'll probably have to eyeball it.  Most bottles have a vertically flat and smooth area that is meant for labels.  Measure the height of that suitable area and pick a size slightly smaller than your measurement.  As an example, the label area on my bottle is 4 inches high.  To keep the label from looking "too tall" I went for a slightly shorter label at 3.5 inches high.  Therefore my final label dimensions are 2.5 inches wide, by 3.5 inches high.  Again, your mileage and measurements will vary.

For my wine bottles I bend the rules a bit and often aim for a horizontal look.  By my 1/3 rule above, my wine labels should be 3.16 inches wide, but to make them more horizontal, I actually make them 5 inches wide and only 3.5 inches tall.  However, to make the label easy to read, I center all of the text I want to be immediately readable, and make sure it's no wider than the 3.16 inches I calculated above.  If I wanted my wine labels to have a vertical look (like my beer bottles), I'd simply stick to the same vertical orientation rules I used above.  Instead, I threw in some guesswork and a little bit of trial and error to come up with the 3.5x5 horizontal label.

Really, having a wider label is okay, as long as the main logo or name is immediately visible and you don't have to spin the bottle around to figure out what it is.  If you named your brew "Dirty Mud Beer" and made the text too wide, you might only be able to see "Dirty Mu" before turning the bottle around a bit to see the rest of it say "d Beer".  If you want to eyeball a label, cut a large rectangular piece of paper (preferably with text or writing on it for points of reference and as a text visibility check) and wrap it around your bottle.  If it's too big, cut it smaller until it looks right.  Note the final size of your paper.  Regardless of my semi-scientific-sounding spiel above, this isn't rocket science.

Label Design:

Hopefully you know how to use a graphics editor.  If not, you'll want to brush up on the basics of creating an image before continuing.  As far as software goes, I'd recommend Gimp for us die-hard free software fans, Adobe Photoshop or some other commercial software if you want better documentation and tutorials.  Most software has the ability to create an image with the dimensions in pixels or in some measurement such as inches.  Choose inches and plug in the label size you chose earlier.

Scour your image library or the internet (Google images may help here) for an image that fits your theme (of course, if using an image from the internet make sure you can legally use the image for your label.  I wouldn't want any of my readers to be sued over copyright infringement.)  I tend to pick images that fit with the brew.  Apple orchards for apple cider, snowy log cabins for winter brews, relaxing beach scenes for summer wines, etc.  Play with a bunch of ideas, or browse around other wine labels for inspiration.

I've broken this behemoth post into two parts.  Part two is coming up in a day or so.