Smokin Bees, Impereal Smoked Whisky Honey Porter
Northern monk, Leeds, UK 2016
The synchronicity in this collaboration with our sponsor Northern Monk Brewery is on point! Firstly and most importantly it involves almost everything we love - anything smoked, whisky, honey and its a Porter which is one of our favorite tipples. Secondly we live and work in Manchester which has various heraldic emblems, most famously the worker bee which symbolises industry. The worker bee was adopted as a motif for Manchester during the Industrial Revolution, at a time when Manchester was taking a leading role in new forms of mass production - a truly northern power house!
Pic - Tom Joy
This is thematically perfect for us, a considerable amount of our work is largely inspired by heritage and our Northern roots - which compliments NMB's ethos perfectly. It gave us the opportunity to playfully create some quirky, smoking bee's complete with all the typical northern old bloke trims you would expect - flat cap's, mustaches, Rose tattoo (I argue its a Yorkshire rose, Aylo would say Lancashire) pipe's, cigars, grumpy faces, war relics etc! Its safe to say we were both reflecting back a lot on our Grandparents during the design process, which I think shines through in the artwork.
Pic - Street Art Atlas
Its been a pleasure to work on something of a smaller scale in the comfort of our studio, sketching, listening to playlists and enjoying the odd beer in the sun. We have had a year of painting colossal murals on the side of buildings so it felt like a nice change to do something a little different, beer and art are pretty much married so it made perfect sense to us to print something interesting on a can! We have previously worked with NMBco and are proud to be part of the patrons project, its great to see all this different creative energy coming together to produce cutting edge exciting beers. We were particularly honored that the beer itself was brewed in collaboration with Against the Grain Brewery hailing all the way from Louisville, Kentucky USA.
