Beverage branding has been a continuous part of my design practice for more than three decades, spanning beer, spirits, and emerging beverage brands. I work across identity, packaging, and the broader visual systems that give a product a distinct and recognizable presence in the marketplace.
The work shown here centers on two current brands—Catskills Brewery and Ancient Drinks—along with a selection of earlier beverage projects.
Building a brand as distinctive as the beer.
Catskill Brewery was already an established craft brewery when we began working together. Based in Livingston Manor, New York, the brewery had built a reputation for serious beer, sustainable production and an unusually broad range of styles. What it lacked was a visual identity capable of expressing all of that at a glance—and of growing with the company.
We completely rethought the identity and packaging around a simple idea: every beer should have its own personality, but every beer should unmistakably belong to Catskill Brewery. A new raccoon became the constant—the recognizable face of the brand—while typography, illustration, color and composition were allowed to change dramatically from beer to beer. Ball Lightning could feel electric. Nightshine could feel dark and slightly dangerous. Grass Wagon could have an entirely different voice. Instead of forcing a growing portfolio into a rigid template, we built a system designed to accommodate difference.
The identity expanded beyond the cans into cartons, signage, merchandise, advertising and the brewery itself, creating a visual language that could work just as effectively on a crowded retail shelf as it did on the side of a building. As new beers and seasonal releases were introduced, the system gave Catskill Brewery room to continually add to the family without diluting the brand.
Over the years since the redesign, Catskill Brewery has continued to expand its presence throughout New York. Its beers are now sold through bars, restaurants and retailers across the state, with continued growth in the New York metropolitan market. The brewery has also accumulated an extraordinary run of recognition, including medals at the New York State Craft Beer Competition, a World Beer Cup medal, and in 2025, the Matthew Vassar Brewer’s Cup naming Catskill Brewery Best Craft Brewery in the Hudson Valley.
The result is not simply a collection of beer labels. It is a brand with enough structure to be recognized and enough freedom to stay interesting—one that has grown alongside the brewery for more than half a decade.
Catskill Brewery
Ancient Drinks
Making something ancient feel completely new.
Ancient Drinks began with an unusual proposition: revive the drinks people used for hydration and recovery hundreds—even thousands—of years before the modern sports drink existed.
There was Switchel, once drunk by American farmers and frontiersmen. Posca, associated with the armies of ancient Rome. Sekanjabin, a vinegar-based refresher with roots in ancient Persia. The recipes were distinctive. So were the names. The challenge was to turn that unfamiliarity into an advantage rather than explain it away.
We built the brand around one simple contradiction: ancient drinks for modern life.
Instead of adopting the clinical language, performance photography and technological aesthetic that dominate the hydration category, Ancient Drinks went in the opposite direction. History became entertainment. Ancient symbols became a contemporary graphic language. Warriors, farmers, animals, ingredients, tools and invented hieroglyphics populate the packaging in a visual system that feels part artifact, part comic strip and part modern consumer brand.
At the center is a deliberately oversized Ancient Drinks identity, surrounded by a constantly changing vocabulary of illustrations. Each product is given its own color and historical world, while the architecture of the cans keeps the family unmistakably together. The result creates tremendous shelf presence without relying on the visual conventions of the category.
The same idea shaped the voice. Yesterade to Slay Today. Life in the past is treated as an extremely dangerous sport. Roman soldiers become endurance athletes. Frontiersmen become the original outdoor competitors. Historical fact, exaggeration and deadpan humor live comfortably together. Even functional product language becomes part of the joke.
That voice and visual system extended far beyond the can—to cartons, digital advertising, animation, merchandise, retail materials and the website—giving Ancient Drinks a brand world large enough to continually generate new stories without losing its identity.
Since launching in 2022, Ancient Drinks has moved from direct-to-consumer sales into broader retail distribution, expanding into natural-food retailers and markets across the country. What began as three obscure drinks from the past became a recognizable challenger brand in one of the most crowded categories in the beverage business.
The strategy was never to make Ancient Drinks look like a healthier sports drink.
It was to make it look like nothing else on the shelf.
Portfolio
Selected Earlier Work
Before Catskill Brewery and Ancient Drinks, beverage branding had already been a significant part of my design career. The work below spans beer, spirits and other drinks created for both emerging brands and established companies, including Jim Beam Brands, Diageo, The Coca-Cola Company, Pepsi, and Rheingold Beer.
The projects vary in scale and era, but the objective has remained remarkably consistent: create an identity with enough character to command attention, enough clarity to communicate quickly, and enough discipline to hold together across packaging, advertising and the larger brand.
This is a selected archive rather than a complete history—work that shows the range of approaches behind the more recent Catskill Brewery and Ancient Drinks case studies.
