BrewDog OverWorks – Cosmic Scotland

At its own purpose-built, 5-million-pound brewing facility in their Scottish heartland, BrewDog has been working away on something wild – OverWorks sour beers, a collision of nature and craft. They came to us to create a world for their long-awaited core collection, a series of tangy and tart cultured brews named Cosmic Crush.

The inspiration for the design stems from how the beers are created and, as Rich Kilcullen Brewmaster at OverWorks describes it, ‘the slow magic’ of the process. Sour beers are not your usual brew, over months of graft at OverWorks’ bespoke brewing facility, ‘fermentationalists’ harness the power of wild yeast to unleash the vibrant tastes of nature.

When brewing sour beer, the usual rules are thrown out the window - which is usually left open to quite literally let the wild things in. Brewed in wooden legacy barrels and fermented with yeast and microbes from Scotland and around the world – the sours’ untamed and temperamental nature informed the design.

Steph Oglesby, senior designer has said: “The scenes on the labels are a collaged exploration of the environments that surround and inform the brewing process. The brewers see the landscape in a different way to us, they see this eclectic potential that nature is waiting to unleash and that’s what we tried to show.

“Each label has a unique shape as if on its own planet made up from elements of the Scottish landscape. The landscapes are stamped and finished with the instantly recognisable OverWorks brand mark, which, as the devils in the detail, we chose to standout in a high build gloss varnish.”

An acidic colour palette is used to not only represent the lip-smacking flavours but also the wild nature of the cultures, that pose a constant threat of cross-contamination with BrewDog’s main brewery which is just a stone's throw away.

Source the Cosmic Crush range now online or from your nearest BrewDog bar.