Hey! I’m Mitch Torbert from Fernson Brewing Company in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I’m the graphic designer most days, but we’re a small company, so I also manage special projects, shoot photos & video, help with marketing, or even stand on the canning line. We all wear a lot of hats!

Fernson just celebrated its seventh anniversary! We were the first full production craft brewery in town (second in the state) which has often given us the exciting opportunity to educate South Dakotans about beer. We have a flagship lager called Lion’s Paw that’s done the heavy lifting of converting folks to craft. Sours weren’t widely available or welcome in South Dakota back when we got started, but we’ve grown an excellent kettle souring program that now makes up a good chunk of our portfolio. And yeah, we make a killer hazy. 🙂

You can #findfernson all across South Dakota, parts of North Dakota, western Minnesota, Minneapolis/St. Paul and NW Iowa. All combined, we make about 5,000 bbls per year with our 30bbl production brewhouse and 5bbl pilot brewhouse.

Initially, I just really wanted to work with the company who was creating the most fun in Sioux Falls. We’re a small but growing city and it was easy to see that Fernson had the position of leading some great culture-building moments–I wanted to be a part of that. That’s turned out to be the most rewarding part of my job, but I also love the diversity of my workflow. A week rarely goes by where I don’t get to shut my laptop and help another department out, or build something, or fix something, or serve beer to our guests. A small team (only 11 full time staff) running a big company means it’s all hands on deck, almost all the time, and that kind of hustle is addicting. 

On a graphics level, not much changed besides volume. When our kegged beer took a dive, distributors and retailers were more than happy to take any limited releases we could make–so we put out more packaged (and labeled) beer than ever before. There was also a sense of forced innovation in the height of it. While it was scary, it was also exhilarating finding solutions to problems we hadn’t encountered. We started canning our pilot batches for to-go sales, struck up new display partnerships with other breweries and retailers, and released new products that we didn’t have time to develop before. All of these things required me to make illustrator files that I wouldn’t have otherwise!

On a company strategy level, we find that embedding ourselves in our community as deeply as we can generates us the most loyal customers. We think excellent beer is table stakes for this business, and I’ll be the first to bet on the quality of Lion’s Paw, Shy Giant, and friends. But we think most folks drink Fernson because they love Fernson. They might’ve gotten hooked when we created a custom beer for a summer festival, or when we sponsor an organization they care about, or because they had a great time in the taproom we brought to downtown Sioux Falls. So, not much of my week goes to traditional signal-boosts of core brands. When it does, we try to make it content-rich. Rather than simply promoting Curio again, we created fruited variants to raise excitement and remind people how great of a beer the base is. We modernized the Shy Giant recipe with Citra hops not long ago, and used that as an opportunity to promote it.

Short answer here is not very much from design & marketing. It’ll undergo a refresh soon and perhaps some brand extensions, but the ongoing success of this beer is thanks in large part to a recipe that’s familiar and elevated enough to reward drinkers, excellent effort from our sales team and distributor, and loyal bars & restaurants in the area that have thrown their weight behind it. We support it with great POS, some billboards, and bar promos, but that stuff doesn’t take much time. 

We’re incredibly grateful for our distribution partners. Especially our close relationships with the folks at Dakota Beverage here in our backyard. They’re right down the street from us, so we’ve found collaboration to be really natural. Thanks mostly to our great volume track record, we’ve got prominent shelf placements at all the big spots in town. We’ve got a delivery vehicle wrapped, and we often get the first call when a promotional placement opens up in stores. As with many things, close relationships with individuals at Dakota Bev tend to return the most powerful opportunities for our beer in the market.

Yeah! As a member of a small team we have a great collaborative environment. We collect feedback from the folks behind the bar and the sales team tells us what retailers are excited about. Blake and Derek (co-founders) are very brand-aware, so conversations about new recipes are often broad enough to include creative direction and brainstorming. It’s a lot of fun.

The Modern Prairie Storybook was so crucial for getting our team to wrap our heads around the same brand voice and effort. It helped us name beers, decorate our space, and integrate the brand into experiences. Last year we used the Brand Deck to unpack this ethos into a set of six words – Approachable, Fun, Imaginative, Simple, Humble, and Sincere. These are all great descriptors of a Modern Prairie Storybook, and we use them to gut-check ourselves on copywriting, partnerships, design, and more. 

In the early years, we leveraged “Fernson The Man” quite literally (we even wrote stories for each beer), but we found folks weren’t attaching themselves to the fantasy the way we were expressing it. And it was fair, it was a lot to ask our guests to verse themselves with a fantasy realm in order to understand our brand. We’ve found it more impactful to let the curious and kind spirit of “Fernson The Man” guide us, rather than his literal story.

In frank terms, there was some misunderstanding with what letter his face was representing. I think part of it came from this really beautiful steel sign that a friend of the brewery made for us, hanging above our taplines out at the brewery. It was in a lot of pictures and despite our best efforts, the face looked a bit like a fish skeleton. We fielded a lot of questions like “what’s the deal with the fish?” or folks calling us “Fernsin” – an uphill battle having chosen a portmanteau of “Fernholz” and “Thompson,” the co-founders. This paired with a number of partnership opportunities that required a smaller logo made it more practical for us to use the “text build” of the logo most of the time.

It’s working well! Sioux Falls has a really active young population that gets excited for the next new sour release, or the freshest hazy IPA, so it’s fun to engage with that part of beer culture. These limited releases (either very small batch at 5bbl or normal size at 30bbl) help us invite folks into the taproom and stay top-of-mind.

Sioux Falls also has a good number of “beer flavored beer” drinkers who want something familiar and friendly that they don’t need to think about much. Our core lineup checks all the boxes for these folks. I see other breweries abandoning their core, and their market probably dictates it, but Sioux Falls appreciates a good humble lager like Lion’s Paw. 

We have some guide rails around the process for sure. Primarily, we get our 12 and 16oz cans base-white printed. So in almost all cases we use a transparent label on that white background. This connects nicely to our core beer cans which are about 2/3 white background. With this opportunity, we try our hardest to keep the graphics from accentuating the top edge of the label. The result is a can that seems “finished” using artwork that feels like it belongs on the can, rather than just stuck onto it. 

After that, we keep our options open. I’ll endorse most of the “keep the brand consistent” conversations out there, but with something as casual as beer, I think people love to see a familiar brand wag its tail a bit! So, while we won’t totally bootleg another brand, you’ll see Supervan Hazy IPA has a classic comic book vibe, or our Milkshake IPA feels like old vanilla ice cream packaging. Illustration is one of my strengths and there aren’t many brands in the area leveraging that on packaging, so that’s an opportunity that we often exploit.

Occasionally they come back! The most successful ones will certainly get re-brewed or scaled up. We check both the “limited release” and “core” boxes with a few series’ that people have become familiar with. We released Cherry Pie Sour, and followed it with Peach, Key Lime, and Blueberry. We released Vanilla Milkshake IPA, then Pink Guava and Cara Cara Orange. We call Gallivant Hazy IPA a “Rotating Hop Series” where the base recipe doesn’t effectively change, but we highlight new hop combinations in each.

5bbl pilot batches stay in-house. Once we jump up to 30bbl we usually rely on at least one distributor to move it around. Larger batches make it out to our full footprint. The rate obviously varies, but we tend to send at least a dozen different limited release beers out to the market.

Early in the process we noted a couple of opportunities. First, we noted how occasion-based drinking was becoming more popular (folks drink beer at the lake, wine on the patio, bourbon during the holidays or whatever combination is natural for them). So, as a member of the better-for-you category, it felt cheeky and liberating for our seltzer to give the drinker permission to take time for themselves, whether on the couch or on a hike. Self care and personal agency have maybe never been as popular as during a pandemic, so that brand voice resonated even better than we expected.

Secondly, the seltzer shelves are blurry with a mess of white cans and bubbles and sans serif fonts. When the category was new, I understand it was prudent to communicate that the beverage was sparkly, light (low-calorie), and modern. But folks know what to expect from a seltzer by now, giving us the freedom to stand off the shelf with bright flat color.

It should be noted that Skip Day Hard Seltzer was designed by Evan Richards who’s since moved on from Fernson. Follow him over on IG. 

Doesn’t really relate. We knew that fans of Fernson would come with us on a new brand journey, if seltzer is their jam. We gave Skip Day it’s own website and Instagram so people can enjoy more of that voice.

Skip Day has made it out to nearly our entire distribution footprint so far, and we have plans to extend it a bit further. However, the seltzer is incredibly tasty, so we won’t rule out any opportunities for it to grow! 

Good design at Fernson connects directly to our vision statement; “The most thoughtful beer experience on earth.” This means we give ourselves the freedom and time to think through a process just a bit further, or put a bit more love into a label or ad campaign, or turning a beer release into an experience, not just an errand. 

Illustratively, I think Evan M. Cohen is doing some of my favorite work for Hudson Valley Brewery. I’ve gushed over Colin Healy at Prairie Artisan Ales for years. Before I was involved in beer, I thought Odell Brewing Company had the coolest labels, and I still think those illustrations from TBD Agency are next level. Matt Irwin at Schell’s Brewing Co. also nails this classic woodblock-inspired style.

I try to read Art and Fear every couple years. I’ll tune into Andy J Pizza’s podcast Creative Pep Talk. I appreciate how Good Beer Hunting talks about the stories surrounding beer—not just beer or art. Mostly, make sure to fill your brain (and belly) with more than beer. It’s easy to lose objectivity when you only think about this industry!

(I’m not too proud to use this forum to ask for more friends! If you’re a beer designer and you want to commiserate or ideate, please slip into my DM’s!)

I assume most folks are reading this because they already know that CODO keeps their finger on the pulse and publishes great content about it. The Craft Beer Branding Guide came in handy on multiple occasions. We have the benefit of being buried deep in the midwest, where trends (for better or worse) take a while to stretch in from the coasts and metropolitan areas. So having my insta loaded with folks doing the coolest stuff is great. I keep my eye on Craft Beer Marketing Awards, and Facebook beer trade groups to figure out what the hottest stuff is (for the record, I don’t condone shipping beer where it’s illegal). Hop Culture Mag is awesome.

We launched a pilsner last year that we named Plains Beer. We wanted to make something familiar enough to be comfortable for domestic drinkers, but with enough of a modern take on heritage beer labels to be exciting for the young folks with growing appreciation for craft lagers. The Craft Beer Marketing Awards thought it was good enough for a gold Crushie in the retro branding section!

Thanks for having me! Always a pleasure to chat with the beer branding pros!