Brooklyn Cider House Branding

BCH is a great project that is part cider, part restaurant, and part upstate farm. Peter Yi is the visionary behind the project. After building a fantastic reputation for selling Spanish wines in America, he turned his gaze on Cider. But not that bullshit cider you see in the beer aisle. We're talking real apples with no residual sugars the way the Basque do it best. The way Brooklynites did it before the Battle of Brooklyn when Brooklyn was called Breuckelen. What's the dutch word for hipster?

Part of the design involved designing the actual product itself. Peter is a madman. He searched high and low to find apples made in New York that he could use for his particular Cider. We discovered that everyone making Cider in New York uses the same apple, the Northern Spy. But Peter wanted to take it back, like before the temperance movement, so he bought the farm (literally) and started to reintroduce apple varietals that hadn't seen New York soil in over 165 years.

To match the extraordinarily (read: excruciating) handmade craft of the cider, we created an entirely new workflow to match the way pre-industrial designers did before movable type. We then spent hundreds of hours in the library searching through old references for the Brooklyn Bridge, cider making, and cider consumption in pre-modern America until we found a hero. That hero image was the key to creating the full range of brand materials.