After two years of being in market and recently opening a brewery, Monument City Brewing Company tasked us with creating a set of can designs for their core offerings, as well as seasonal and limited batch brews. A new space in the community meant increased production and new opportunities for packaging.

With a well-established brand presence in the Baltimore area, the updated packaging needed to maintain the look and feel of the previous bottle packaging, but take it a step further with a full-wrap design. Because this is a new brewery, our team needed to ensure when consumers saw cans on the shelf instead of bottles, they instantly recognized the product and continued to purchase their favorites.

Similar to our original packaging for six-packs, bottles, and cases, we landed on a bold flood of color to identify each beer and simple iconography, along with Brewer’s Notes on packaging for the true beer enthusiast to get excited about. All of this gave us a way to clearly communicate to consumers what they can expect upon choosing Monument: straightforward, high-quality beers that stand out from the crowd. For seasonal and limited batches, minimizing the iconic color floods of the core offerings and featuring detailed, custom illustrations allowed us to tell a more complex story behind each seasonal beer and its Baltimore roots. We even broke out our pencils and created the illustrations in-house!

Since moving to cans from bottles, Monument has sold out of each canning run to date, within days of packaging. Increased demand has led to scaling, including the transition from heat shrink sleeves to printed cans. Our design was also featured in The Dieline, an international packaging website.