Custom Beer Labels for Cans, Bottles and Kegs

What Beer Labels Have to Survive

A beer label has one job that overrides everything else: it cannot lift in an ice bucket. Every other decision on the label sits behind that one.

Ice, Condensation and Cold Fill

Beer is filled cold, stored cold, sold from a cooler and served from ice. Every one of those stages attacks the bond between the label and the can or bottle. Condensation gets under a paper edge and wrinkles it. Ice water soaks a stock that was never meant to be wet. A label that curls at the corner in a cooler undoes whatever the design was supposed to accomplish, and it is the version of your brand the customer photographs. That is why we choose the stock and the adhesive for a cold wet surface first, with the aesthetics built on top of a material that already holds.

Why Cans Changed Craft Beer Packaging

Printed cans come from a can manufacturer at minimum quantities that run into the tens of thousands per design. A craft brewery running a seasonal in two hundred cases cannot use them. Labeling blank cans removed that barrier: the brewery buys plain cans, applies a label or a sleeve, and changes the art as often as it likes. That is why can labels and shrink sleeves carry so much of the craft category now. We run both on our own presses in Farmingdale, so a brewery can move between a label and a sleeve without changing supplier or losing color between the two.

What a Beer Label Has to Carry

A beer label carries a brand name, a class or type designation, net contents, the name and address of the brewer or bottler, the required government warning, and depending on the product and the state, alcohol content. Federal approval is required before a label can be used and individual states add requirements on top. Rules change, so confirm the current ones with your regulatory advisor before going to print. For a brewery running seasonals, that approval step is the reason label lead time gets planned backward from the canning date rather than forward from the artwork. Our digital presses are what keep that schedule workable, because a short run carries no plate cost and the price does not move when a design has twelve colors instead of four.

Why Packaging Decides the First Purchase

A craft beer shelf offers a shopper dozens of unfamiliar choices at once, and most of them have never tasted any of them. The label is the only information they have. The survey finding on the page above, that more than 71% of craft beer drinkers prefer to try brands with bold and interesting packaging, is the measurable version of that. A metallic element that catches the cooler light, a no label look that reads as painted on the bottle, a texture the hand notices. Those are what earn the first purchase; the beer earns the second. With more than 75 years behind us we have earned the trust of breweries throughout the United States, and specialty finishing is where most of that first purchase gets won.