Monday 16 April 2012

Blighty's beer

The RAF roundel, for various reasons, is one of my favourite pieces of design. I've got it on my website and there are a few brands around that use it in some way as their logo. Ben Sherman, obviously, and rather inexplicably, the German non-alcoholic success story, Bionade.

On my recent visit to the UK, I was reminded of a unashamedly alcoholic brand that also uses the roundel as its cap design. I didn't really witness Spitfire Ale's take-off and climb to the dizzy heights of being the Shepherd Neame Brewery's biggest-selling cask conditioned ale, as I've been out of Blighty since the mid-90s, but I must admit that the whole package is a fine piece of marketing.

Now, I may be too eingedeutscht to find the advertising that hilarious - or maybe I just need a couple of pints of Spitfire to guffaw over "Göring, Göring, Gone" and wordplays on Fokker - but from a design point of view, it's a dream. I love the strapline "Bottle of Britain" - and the beer is more than drinkable, too.

The slightly rum thing was that I spied Spitfire Ale for sale in Lidl in the UK. Maybe those Krauts aren't so sour about the whole thing after all.

2 comments:

Rate My Sausage said...

Now THAT is a tipple that seems to be brewed specifically to go with sausages! Deee-licious, help yourselves chaps, there's no fighter escort....

Sue, as you're a roundel fan, you'll probably like an upcoming feature on RMS in which we attempt to dispose of some disgustingly low quality Iceland sausages in a variety of imaginative ways, including wellington boots disguised as WWII bombers.

Sue Imgrund said...

Isn't that sort of treatment normally reserved for the poor German Würstchen? Look forward to it - substandard sausages, watch out!