Spear: Melville's real fruit beers

Innis & Gunn, the independent speciality brewer has launched a fruity new brand. Melville’s Raspberry and Melville’s Strawberry (4.1% abv, 275ml) are flavoursome, real fruit flavoured beers equipped with stylish labels courtesy of Spear.

Brewed using 100% Scottish pressed fruit the new beer brings a fresh edge to a mature category, comprised largely of Belgian imports with old-fashioned packaging. Dougal Sharp, managing director of Innis & Gunn comments:

“Oak aged beer remains Innis & Gunn’s speciality and our brands are enjoying another very successful year, but our obsession with flavour always drives us to think about which other beer styles we might like to brew. We grow some of the world’s best strawberries and raspberries in Scotland… the flavours from the berries in harmony with our beer are as close to perfect as we can get.”

Following the success of the award winning labels for Innis & Gunn’s Oak-Aged Beer (First Place – FINAT – Flexography 2010), the brewers looked to Spear to create an equally impressive label for their innovative product.

The vintage style designs with a contemporary twist are printed on a pressure sensitive matte paper stock, decorated with bold variant colours. Spear combined this with a matte gold hot foil and a specialist rotary screen printed varnish to achieve a textured, eye catching finish.

Creative support and brand evaluation is a key element of Spear’s System approach. As part of Spear’s design process, our studio utilises state of the art digital imaging software. This allowed Melville’s brand developers to see a realistic 3D image of their label on screen. Not only is this ideal for developing & fine-tuning artwork early

in the design process, it’s also an excellent tool for brand promotion. Innis & Gunn used our 3D prototypes to promote Melville’s to supermarket giant Tesco, where they now sell the product nationwide.

Operations Manager, Heather Gillespie comments:
“We were incredibly impressed by Spear’s 3D software which is quite revolutionary, allowing brands like Innis & Gunn to promote their product weeks before the labels are printed.  It has been great to work with Spear as they are clearly leading the way with this kind of technology.”