Art You Can Drink

You may have seen me plaster ‘Art You Can Drink’ everywhere. It’s a big deal to us. It’s on our website, our can labels, beer mats, merch and more. Of course, owning a brewery and being a big beer fan, I’d say that beer is art, but I wanted to make an explicit connection between what we drink and how it’s presented. 

The beer industry collaborating with artists on branding and design is nothing new. We’re not breaking boundaries here, we’re simply highlighting a significant connection and elevating it to a central part of our own brand. 

Beer is an important part of our global culture. Art is nearly as important. So it makes sense that they go together. And with our backgrounds here at Hand Brew Co it was an obvious and necessary relationship.

A million years ago, Experience Director Jennifer Left (my wife and business partner) and I used to be musicians. It’s how we met - on stage when both our bands were performing at the Komedia in Brighton. 

Music and art is in our bones, so when we got the chance many years later to buy the creative hub, the Hand in Hand in Kemptown, Brighton, we jumped at the chance. 

The Hand was a place filled with musicians, writers, producers, painters and makers - nestled amongst the eclectic local community members and wonderfully eccentric Brighton characters. It really was a creative hub where people came together and shared ideas. By all accounts it always has been, having hosted the likes of Laurence Olivier and Max Miller many moons ago. 

When Jen and I moved out of the pub, we offered the apartment to artists for free so they could concentrate on their craft and not have the burden of Brighton rent stifling their creativity. We built a music studio in the loft. A place to write, record and rehearse. 

Our two pubs - the Hand and the Toad - put on incredibly creative events like weekly live Jazz and DJs and monthly Folk and Shanties as well as taking part in events like the Great Escape. 

Recently, the Toad put on a monster schedule of events for Worthing Festival 2024 including the installation of a white-wall gallery called Newland Gallery (it’s on Newland Road in Worthing), where over 50 artists exhibited their work. Bl​ü​te, Ger​ü​st provided the backing for a silent film with improv musicians, there was a Swing Tea Party for dancers and a New Generation Jazz Showcase. 

Our Worthing brewery hosted an immersive film event with Worthing Film Club, showing the Japanese horror sci-fi film, Tetsuo alongside live performances and a live set from Worthing Techno Militia. 

The point is, I suppose, is that it’s the creativity of our community that drives us. Brewing excellent, accessible beer and providing welcoming spaces enables us to explore and enjoy the art, music and maker scenes. We love it!

Back to Art You Can Drink. 

When we were expanding and rebranding, we wanted to develop a brand that was bold and fresh - of course, to stand out - but to somehow feel different. Initially we thought of creating a rotating brand partner strategy, where each year a new artist would take charge of our look and feel. 

We loved the idea and started working with a few artists to scope out the opportunity. It felt good. It looked great. All the different artists on our can labels and product badges. And then we thought “every year? We’ve got to change them every year? So this one that we really love will be gone in a year?”. Hmmm.

We went over that a few times - the planning, the production, the costs. This was a big undertaking for a fledgling brewery like ours. The coordination alone would have been most of my job. The price of relabelling and reprinting everything. The updates on websites etc. It was all possible, all doable, but maybe something to put on the back burner.

In any case, as soon as we saw HelloMarine’s work on our products, something just clicked. We were so happy that Marine was up for doing this and we loved how it all looked that we thought “this is it. This is the one”. 

HelloMarine’s goal as an artist is to deliver a sense of innocent and joyful escapism and create pieces that radiate positive energy back to the viewer.

She says, “Colour, music and nature are all positive influences on our thoughts and moods, and are the three recurrent themes in my paintings. My work is ebullient and bold and hopefully a catalyst for good feelings and positive energies.”

So that was set, we now had an exciting artist as our brand partner - an artist in residence. Marine would create new pieces or share work she had already done for each one of our core range beers and our annual specials. Please check her out and buy some art.

Art You Can Drink was starting to form in my mind, and when I had a conversation with another artist, it properly landed. 

I was having some fresh tasty pints in the Hand with our pal, David Shrigley, and it occurred to us that he didn’t have his own beer. But he should have his own beer. And after a few more pints, we decided that he definitely should have his own beer. 

Toadlicker was born. 

Toadlicker is a 4% Grapefruit Pale Ale. It was created by blending David’s favourite beer, Shaka, with a quality grapefruit extract. David came up with the name, the art, and the animation and script for the ads, naturally. 

You can see the animation and find out more here. It includes important information like “... it has nothing to do with toads or other amphibians. Nor do I encourage you to lick toads or other amphibians. It’s just the name of my beer.“

The idea of this collaboration was threefold - to add a beer to David Shrigley’s portfolio, to help us reach more people and get our beers into galleries and art spaces, but more importantly to create a profit share for charity. 25% of profits from this beer go directly to the Fitzherbert Community Hub in Kemptown, Brighton - a charity chosen by David and close to all of our hearts locally.

The Fitzherbert Community Hub is “four established, local organisations with a shared vision of progressively and determinedly reducing food poverty and social isolation in East Brighton by providing a space where local people come together to eat, form lasting relationships, exercise and belong”. 

The four organisations are: The Real Junk Food Project, Brighton Table Tennis Club, Voices in Exile and St John the Baptist Church.

Toadlicker is our biggest seller online - we sell gift boxes with cans and glasses, and also t-shirts and posters - but it is fast becoming one of our biggest selling trade beers too. This is good news for us, but also great for the charity.

This new beer with Shrig gave me an idea: arcing back to our original plan of rotating artists, maybe we could develop an Art You Can Drink programme. Each year, we work with an artist in a different discipline to create a one-off beer that contributes a share of profits to a charity of the artists’ choice. 

The second collaboration we did for the Art You Can Drink programme was with recipe writer, chef and hot honey hero, Ben Lippett. Obviously food is art, especially Ben’s. Check out his Substack and subscribe to everything he says. 

The beer we made with Ben was a 4% Vienna Lager called Wiener Dawg, and the charity Ben chose was the Trussell Trust who are fighting to end food poverty. The art for this collaboration was created by Sophie Winder. 

This year's collaboration is with an actor. Next year we’re hoping to work with a comedian, and then a musician, and then a poet. You get the idea. Essentially, we end up with a lineup of Art You Can Drink artists, each with a unique and interesting beer and much needed extra cash for the charities.

So that’s why we write Art You Can Drink everywhere. Because artists design the outsides, and artisans design the insides.