Bonfire Brewing wins prize for bottle design at international competition
Eagle-based Bonfire Brewing won a Gold Crushie award at the 2021 Craft Beer Marketing Awards for the design of their limited edition 10th Anniversary brown ale bottle.
Bonfire Brewing recently won an award at the 2021 Craft Beer Marketing Awards (CBMA), taking home a Gold Crushie for the bottle design of their No. 10 Barrel-Aged Quadruple Demshitz Brown Ale.
The CMBA Crushie Awards were created in 2020 to recognize the best in beer marketing and design around the world. Over 300 judges evaluated submissions in 33 categories, including best bottle design, best tap handle design, best website and best original marketing video, among others.
This is the first international competition to recognize the artwork, design and retail marketing efforts behind craft beer, which has grown exponentially in importance as the industry becomes more and more crowded.
“Our panel of over 300 judges from around the world had their work cut out for them this year,” said CMBA Co-Founder Jackie DiBella. “The difference between winners came down to a quarter of a point in some cases – it was a tough competition!”
Bonfire Brewing was one of five companies awarded a Gold Crushie in the Best Bottle Design, 22-26 oz category for the Americas. The inaugural CMBA competition only considered submissions from North America, but this year winners were recognized from each region of the globe, divided into the Americas, Europe, Asia/Pacific, and Middle-East/Africa. Across all categories, five of the winning breweries were based out of Colorado.
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Cheyenne Richardson is the lead designer at Bonfire Brewing. When the brewery decided to produce a limited-edition, barrel-aged ale to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the first beer they ever produced, the classic brown ale, she knew she had to come up with a special design to meet the moment.
“We wanted it to look very sophisticated, the type of thing where you look at it on the shelf and go ‘Wow, do I even want to open that beer?'” Richardson said. “Since it’s our tenth anniversary label, we wanted to make it look a little vintage, even though it’s a modern design. And we added a lot of ornate elements to it and made it extra fancy, because it’s an extra fancy beer!”
The eye-catching label design, featuring gold art-deco design elements and geometric patterns, was capped off with a wax melted seal, marked on top with the company’s flame logo.
The No. 10 Barrel-Aged Quadruple Demshitz Brown Ale boasts an Alcohol by Volume (ABV) level of 14 percent, a result of the extensive aging process that they treated the beer. The limited-edition bottles are now sold out.
“Most of the people who bought it bought two so that they could have one now and then age one for later,” Richardson said.
When Richardson and owner Amanda Jessen heard about the Crushie awards, they decided to submit the bottle for consideration, and were delightfully surprised to watch their bottle be awarded on the live streamed awards event.
“I started jumping up and down and immediately called Amanda,” Richardson said. “Usually in the beer industry, you just send in beers for competitions on flavor profiling. There are not many contests for packaging, and we’re really excited to have won this award.”
Those who missed out on tasting the contents of this award-winning, limited-edition bottle should keep an eye out for a new line of canned beer that the company will be debuting later this year.
