Beer · Illustration system
The worlds of
Yampa Valley
The challenge
This one started in 2017 and ran for years. Yampa Valley Brewing didn't hire an illustrator for a label. Over that time, they handed over a whole brewery — a core lineup, a barrel-aged series, a wild sour line, one-off experiments. Twenty labels, each needing its own face, all under one roof.
That's the trap. Hand that much range to most illustrators and you get one of two failures: every beer looks identical because the artist has one trick, or every beer looks like a different brewery because the artist chased each brief without a thread. Yampa needed the impossible middle — a space dog, a witch on a broomstick and an angry peach flying a helicopter, all unmistakably from the same place.
The face
The thread isn't a style. It's a discipline. One brewer's mark — a stag skull, antlers wide — anchors everything, from a can of light lager to the gold-waxed neck of a barrel special. Under it runs the real signature: the same hand-drawn line, the same weight, the same refusal to phone in a single label.
Everything else is free to move. A style gets chosen per beer, not per artist — engraved and naturalistic where the beer is a Colorado story, painted and theatrical where it's a fairy tale, loud and cartoon where it's a wild sour that wants to misbehave. The animal in a costume is played straight every time: the stoat coal-miner believes in his lamp, the crane carries its rider like a local legend everyone already knows. Range on the surface, one author underneath.
What stayed,
what changed
Stayed — across the brewery
The stag-skull mark. The ornamental band top and bottom of each can. The name set large, the ABV small and low. And the thing you can't fake: one person's hand and one standard of finish, whether the beer sells for four dollars or ages in bourbon barrels.
Changed — line to line
The whole visual language resets per line. Core is engraving — black-line animals dressed for their beer, on a sunset panel. The Barrel Cathedral is a gothic arch and painted folk-horror scenes. The Barrel Room turns cinematic — a stag in headlights, deep in the woods. The one-offs let go entirely: surreal fruit monsters, gold teeth, mayhem. Four rooms, one house.
The world
The proof isn't on the shelf — it's on the street. The characters didn't stay on the cans. Space Dog rides down the side of the delivery van; Valley Girl gallops across its back doors. Inside the taproom, the same labels hang as painted panels, and the stag mark is painted straight onto the wall.
That's the test an illustration system passes only if it was built right in the first place. A drawing that works at can size and nowhere else is decoration. A drawing that becomes the vehicle, the wall, the room the beer is poured in — that's a brand world. The beer was where it started. It isn't where it stopped.
The result
Twenty labels across four lines — core, barrel-aged, wild and one-off — drawn between 2017 and the sale of the brewery, held together by one mark and one hand. The brewery is still pouring in Hayden, Colorado, under new ownership.
“Awesome, as always. Great to work with. Timely responses.”
Yampa Valley Brewing Company
Want one of these
for your own range?
Tell me what you're making and what comes after it. I'll tell you which chapter it is — and if it isn't a fit, I'll say so.