Spirits Packaging Critique: Brooklyn Gin
At some point while working on my masters thesis, one of my advisors sent me an article about Brooklyn Gin. She likes gin, knew I was doing a lot of analysis of spirits packaging for my thesis, and noticed this brand. And I’m pretty sure that’s how it started but the important part is that I found myself looking at this Brooklyn Gin bottle and wondering why it seemed so off to me. First of all, it is important to note my bias: I am immediately skeptical of anything that names itself Brooklyn, it’s just memed to death at this point. I think peak Brooklyn Branding was when Milton Glaser of all people made that god awful Brooklyn Brewery logo that literally looks like a beer league t-shirt and in a “free vector art” way, not in an endearing way. This bias tends to serve me well though, and as such the moment I started poking at Brooklyn Gin’s bottle design things got weird. Not everything that is “small batch” or “artisan” or whatever needs to play the heritage branding game, and Brooklyn Gin is a great example of a company trying to jump on the heritage bandwagon and just not having the depth of concept to pull it off.
“To capture the ‘locally-produced, hand-crafted spirits,’ the design firm focused on the energy and vibe of Brooklyn and the ‘DIY movement.’ The design and colors capture the ‘gritty’ feel, and they found inspiration for the bottle in the ‘apothecary origins of gin.’”
The crown logo is heavy-handed and seems obvious in terms of “what do we put on this seal to make it look cool and vintage-y.” I suppose it could be reference to Crown Heights, which I’m told is a locale in Brooklyn, but there’s nothing else here that would inform that reading of the symbol. If you’re not going to tell me what the crown is about, or the reason for the crown thing is not super obvious, then why are you giving me this logo? I actually google image searched seal and crown vector designs to see if something strangely similar would pop up, because I really cannot imagine what the intention of the crown symbol would be, except that someone saw a crown and it looked cool, and if the concept behind this logo is that lazy then it’s likely that there were other forms of laziness going on. The design is so basic and clean that it immediately looks computer generated. Usually the whole point of a logo like this is to invoke a time before computer generated vector art when craftspersons would design and execute this logo by hand, there are many logos today that look the way they do because the brand was first conceived before the advent of computers. If you don’t have actual woodcuts or whatever to base your logo on, you’ll have to try and replicate that feel some other way. If I did no research or ideation and were trying to fake a vintage-y design real quick so I could get paid, I would throw some scuffs and imperfections and texture in there to mimic historical modes of typography, printing, and mark making, but Brooklyn Gin does not even try that. The end product is this extremely hollow and soulless logo, almost uncanny, represented on a bronze medallion placed front and center on the bottle, which to be frank serves as the main value proposition for buying a bottle of Brooklyn Gin.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with designing something that looks cool just so that it looks cool. The problem comes when you bring a “just looks cool” idea to a “this is an artisan heritage brand that speaks to a place and time and whatever” fight. This also goes for spirits packaging design in general, there is nothing wrong with designing a really cool bottle that someone will want to save after it’s empty. I give spirits a lot of leeway on devoting extra time and energy and resources to making an appealing bottle, because a lot of the time the bottle is the beginning and end of the brand for consumers. Brooklyn Gin’s bottle is nothing if not attractive-looking, it’s also hefty and satisfying to hold. The wobbly glass gives that look of rustic imperfection and a fun tactile quality but honestly, next to the way-too-clean medallion it annoys me. The shape of the bottle is unique and kind of cool, almost evoking one of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, but again it’s not a strong enough choice to make you go “ah yes, the Brooklyn Bridge” and so it ends up being another source of awkwardness to me. The only thing about this bottle that clearly says “Brooklyn” to me is literally the word Brooklyn. Well okay, that and the general idea of slapping half-baked ideas together in the name of Brooklyn Branding to cash in on everyone’s Brooklyn Boner.
The thing that really gets me about this bottle though, that simply annoys me to death, is the label beneath the medallion. There are a lot of messages being sent by the visual choices here, I spent time in my thesis talking about this same vibe that hints at tax stamps and government documents, and which has its basis in the history of alcohol as a consumer good in the USA. I don’t expect the designer of this bottle to have thought that deeply about why they use this “look” as a shorthand for old-timey booze, but it gets a little insulting when you make it to the boxes on the bottom half of the label.
Often on bottles of liquor that state “small batch” or what have you, that claim is given extra weight by the inclusion of batch-specific serial numbers or dating. For instance, on bottles of Blanton’s single barrel bourbon, each bottle is hand numbered, I’ve been to Buffalo Trace and seen the production line and workers writing on each bottle in gold Sharpie pen. Other times, batch numbers and the like are printed mechanically but still occupy a specific spot on the label where a consumer would look to see what is essentially a guarantee of quality and a reasoning for the extra money they would spend on such a bottle.
The two open rectangles are a visual device that represents batch numbering, or otherwise a spot on the bottle where the “craft” of a “craft beverage” would be emphasized in whatever way as a value proposition. Brooklyn Gin knows that this is a thing that appears on some bottles of booze, but they don’t seem to know or care why that is a thing. The size of the bottle (750ml) and the alcohol by volume (40%) would not change from batch to batch, so why print them on top of these boxes in a way that visually suggests a quality that would change from bottle to bottle? This detail is probably just another case of making a thing that looks cool just for the sake of it, but to those who know what they’re looking for on liquor bottles it suggests that this company doesn’t understand its own milieu or, if you’re always in a salty mood about this kind of thing like I am, that they’re actually being deceptive.
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