Rhône Brew — a kingdom with a real address

The challenge

A brewery and its taproom, inside a medieval building in Saint-Chef. The client arrived with the idea already formed: human bodies, heads of local animals, one character per beer.

They came to me first. I sent two sketches of a frog king. Then they went quiet for six months.

They came back with a problem. Someone had generated their king with AI. When they asked to change his pose, it couldn't be changed — only regenerated into a different king. They had a picture. What they needed was a cast that could grow: five beers, then a sixth, then whatever the brewery reached for next.

The face

The logo was already in the building. A heraldic blazon carved into the stone wall — I redrew it as the mark. Nothing invented.

Same rule for the cast. Every animal is one that lives in the region. Every costume is real period dress. And behind every character stands a real building from the town.

Le Dauphin — a frog in a crown, standing outside the taproom door. Cardinal — a stoat in red, facing the church across the road. Le Bourreau — a badger with an axe, in front of the scaffold, drawn the way it was actually built.

Drink a Le Dauphin inside the taproom, and the door on the label is the door you walked through.

Every character starts as two sketches — different pose, different temperament. The client picks one. The one that isn't picked is the reason the drawing can still change later.

The rough first.

Every character begins here — a dirty pencil, two or three options, nothing precious. This is what you get before you get the drawing. It's supposed to look unfinished.

The cast.

Six characters, one year. Each one a person, an animal, and a real building from the town — left. The bottle it became — right.

What stayed,
what changed

Stayed

A human body in period dress. The head of a local animal. A real building from Saint-Chef behind it, drawn in line. The same label anatomy every time — brewery block left, logo centre, ingredients right. And the same line in the ingredients panel on every bottle: aucun animal réel n'a été humilié durant la fabrication de cette bière.

Changed

The colour, and almost nothing else. Each label is keyed to the beer inside it. Gold for the blonde. Blue for the weissbier. Teal for the IPA. Red for the red ale. Charcoal for the stout. New beer, new character, same kingdom.

Six characters in one year. The sixth broke the rule on purpose — a Christmas stout, and the only human head in the kingdom, standing outside the same church as the Cardinal.

The world

The brewery printed the characters themselves and put them up on the taproom wall — in gilt frames, on medieval stone — and onto the menu. Not posters. Portraits of the people who live in the building.

Since then they have built their own market banners and social headers out of the cast, without asking me. That's what a system is for: it keeps working when the illustrator isn't in the room.

In the room.

Not renders. Photographs of the thing after it left my hands.

The last one they built themselves, out of the cast, without asking me. Not how I'd have done it. That's the point.

The result

Six characters, drawn across 2023 — five beers, then a sixth. Three years on the cast is unchanged, because nothing has needed adding: it still covers everything the brewery puts out.