Design Champions: Meantime

Like many of my colleagues at The Big Picture – I’m a fan of good beer. A brand that seduces the eyes as well as the taste buds is sure to find a place in my heart.

Meantime have been producing high quality beer for nearly two decades and when we first set eyes on their unique bottle it was clear they were a brand with an appreciation for design’s role in seducing consumers.

But it’s their Brewery Fresh project, initiated in 2013 and inspired by continental European beer culture, that really shows how they celebrate the 360 degree role design can play in brand engagement.

Installed in a number of pubs around London, Brewery Fresh creates an unavoidably immersive environment that brings the brewery feel you might expect at the brand’s home in Greenwich to your local. Pipes run from the huge metallic tanks, suspended about revellers, winding around the pub and garden and in to the bar.

At every turn there’s an industrial metallic pipe, often inscribed with playful messages proclaiming ‘beer this way’. All of this conveying a freshness and superiority that beer drinkers have come to expect of craft beer over the last decade.

Handwritten chalk boards identifying beer type, birthday and brewer tap in to the age-old characteristics of individuality and human traits that millennials so yearn. Meantime are not the only brand to employ this on-trade engagement but perhaps it’s their local provenance and design detailing that makes it resonate more than others for me.

If behavioural economics teaches us anything, it’s that our choices are impacted by the environment around us. When delivered in such a cohesive design language the choice when you reach the busy bar becomes a very simple one!