Nendo: Coffee beer

Coffee and beer aficionados alike are learning that adding coffee beans to beer during the brewing process gives resulting the resulting beer a rich, deep taste, thanks to the beans’ bitterness and aroma.

Nendo designed the bottles for Coffee Beer, a collaboration between Anchor Coffee, a coffee business in Kesennuma, a small city in northern Japan, and a Japanese sake and beer brewery Sekinoichi of Ichinoseki, another small city in the same region. Both Kesennuma and Ichinoseki were devastated by the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, so the beer is a charity project to fundraise for disaster relief.

To keep costs low, we used the existing bottles, and covered them with small labels in the shape of coffee beans, applied by hand. The bottle design is at once simple enough to maintain brand identity and unique, as the pattern varies slightly with every bottle. Large beer breweries who produce standard products on a mass scale simply can’t offer products like this one, and that's the point: we wanted the packaging to convey the makers’ thoughts and feelings with each bottle.