Sartori Harvest IPA

Creative Agency: Hired Guns Creative
Project Type: Produced, Commercial Work
Client: Driftwood Brewing
Location: Nanaimo, Canada

Driftwood Brewery’s Sartori Harvest IPA is the most highly-anticipated beer released in BC each year. It is an extremely limited wet-hopped IPA made with fresh hops from Chilliwack’s Sartori Cedar Ranch. The brewer travels to the hop farm to help with the harvest, brings the fresh hops back to Victoria, and then brews the very next morning.

The beer that results from this highly labour-intensive process is truly world class and the demand for it is substantial. It tends to sell out in Vancouver and Victoria within a day or two. The stores that sell Sartori Harvest have taken to putting a limit on the number of bottles that each customer can purchase. (4-6 seems to be the max.) Twitter explodes on the release day with Sartori sightings. Beer geeks are known to take the day off work so they can visit multiple liquor stores and get their hands on as many bottles as possible.

Our goal in redesigning the Sartori Harvest label was to bring the packaging up to the level of the actual beer. We were able to take advantage of Driftwood’s new bottling line, which can handle labels that wrap almost the entire circumference of the bottle and custom die-cut shapes.

The new custom typography and overall design of the label emphasize the epicness of the beer inside the bottle.