Concept Brewing & Distilling

Concept Brewing & Distilling is a Christchurch craft brewery known for clean lagers, punchy IPAs, rich stouts and a confident range of curveballs for the adventurous. The brand sits deliberately between old-school craftsmanship and modern edge, and Obvious worked on the full identity rollout that carries that positioning across cans, taproom, merch, web and the cold cabinet.

The Brief

The NZ craft beer category has matured to the point where the visual conventions are tight: variant-coloured cans, retro-style typography, an over-design tendency that fights for attention rather than creating it. Concept needed an identity that read as confident and grounded — a brand that feels honest, local, and unmistakably its own — without becoming another shouty brewery on a crowded shelf.

The Strategic Decision

Sailor-Jerry-inspired aesthetic. The identity drew from old-school tattoo-flash discipline: bold, pared-back, character-driven. A grammar that could hold beer names like ‘Cold Gregg’, ‘Le Lait Noir’ and ‘Cyril Stoatgobbler’ without losing seriousness.
Beer-name personality, not slogan-noise. Each brew got a character name that felt like an old friend rather than a marketing tagline. The system was built to make these names the point.
Built for the FMCG line-up. Cold IPA, Milk Stout, Lager, Pale Ale, Hazy Pale Ale, NZ Pilsner, Hazy Lemonade, Ginger Beer — the system had to scale across the full range without losing distinction between SKUs.

The Rollout

Full identity rollout: beer mats, can labels, hoodie and t-shirt merch, posters, tap badges and the website. Each touchpoint built around the same Sailor-Jerry-inspired discipline: bold marks, considered typography, and a tone of voice that sounds like the brewery actually does.

Why This Mattered

FMCG brand work in a crowded category is one of the harder briefs in commercial design. The brands that win are the ones with conviction at the cold cabinet — not the ones that shout the loudest. Concept Brewing is one of our clearest references for how restraint, character and disciplined typography produce a craft brand that holds its own at scale.