Beer Coaster Tycoon

A selection of beermats collected by my boyfriend's roommate

Aside from the occasional Asahi with sushi or Tsingtao with Chinese food, I don’t drink beer. I feel the same way as every other non-beer drinker does — it makes me feel too full, it’s too bitter, the promised “tasting notes” of juicy citrus or plump berries or blooming florals never comes to fruition for me. Yet there was a moment in time, before I really launched my career, when I saw designing a beer label or can as the great white whale of a designer’s portfolio, a coveted project that anointed you as a Cool Designer (or at least as someone who had a friend of a friend who worked at a craft brewery). Despite my abstention from drinking the stuff, I too yearned to brand a kooky, illustration-forward, not-like-other-beers beer. It never happened for me (mainly because I didn’t actually try that hard to make it happen), and in 2024, the moment feels as if it has passed. The market is saturated and there are trendier fish to catch for one’s F&B design portfolio: irreverent snacks to brand, austere labels to adorn NA bottles of non-wine wine, chili crisp to package and then get sued over.

My brief emotional dip into the craft beer mania of the 2010s never expanded beyond the nebulous desire to design a hazy IPA, so I’m relatively unfamiliar with heritage beer brands. They seem well-designed to me — sturdy, functional type, with many crests and laurels — but overall, a little boring. So recently, at my boyfriend’s apartment, when I rifled through a glass bowl filled with dozens of paper coasters, I was pleasantly surprised to see these very traditional brands have a ridiculous amount of fun. There are inventive diecuts, playful trompe l'oeil elements, and humor in spades. Even on the coasters that merely mimic their labels, I was able to appreciate details I’d missed before: stippled banners, thick swashes adorning a script, the careful use of borders and frames.

That this specific coaster collection is rife with perfect design is no accident. They belong to my boyfriend’s roommate, Ben Kothe, an art director at The Atlantic and very talented friend of this newsletter. Ben has impeccable taste and a unique appreciation of the weird and wonderful, and did not bat an eyelid when I asked him if I could take a handful of his beloved coasters home to scan (and return, I promise!). Thank you to Ben, fellow steward of design history and print ephemera, for finding, saving, and letting me share these gems.

A brief history of beer coasters: also known as “beermats,” their current form (pulped, absorbent printed cardboard) is thought to have been invented in Germany in the 1880s. Today, they still observe their original function as an object meant to soak up excess moisture from a beer glass, but they’re also used as an advertising gimmick. Above are two coasters that approximate their bottle labels. At a slightly larger scale than you’d find on a bottle, you pick up on more detail, like the miniature cityscape set into the star on the Newcastle coaster, or the pretzel-esque rope emblem on the Marston’s.

Similarly, the Cameron’s coaster appears to be a label, though a look through Strongarm bottles through the years shows a slightly different arrangement of type and illustrations. Here, the lion extends past the interior oval frame, leaping over the banner in a dynamic movement.

The John Smith’s coaster takes the shape of a tap handle, a subtle mimicry that leads us to…

…full trompe l'oeil! My favorite of the bunch is this pint-shaped Hansa coaster, which includes cheeky instructions for wrapping your hand around the cardboard beer in order to practice for the real thing. It’s a playful tactic for a brand with a severe blackletter logo, and demonstrates an understanding of how people interact with these coasters: drunk at the bar, with their friends. It’s easy to imagine carefully placing your fingers and thumbs in their designated place while slightly buzzed off a happy hour special.

Slightly more refined is this Carlsberg coaster, where the printed condensation is so simple yet so effective. Beer is gross but I am almost craving a cold one while looking at this.

De Koninck is a Belgian beer, and this comic coaster appears to say “water in the cellar (his pants are too short)” in what I’m assuming is Flemish Dutch. I think I’m missing something in translation, but I like this guy’s goofy striped pants and the little mouse rowing his boat.

I don’t know when this Carling coaster was made, but I do believe we are witnessing a ripple effect of The Most Interesting Man in the World campaign. To me, this is infinitely more compelling than a Dos Equis commercial — the little torn edges of the newspaper and the snarky note written in Sharpie scrawl say just enough without needing anything more.

An extremely ambitious die-cut here in the shape of the island of Jersey. Mary Ann is such a good name for a beer, and the simplicity of the blue border and the chunky black type make up for the fact that this shape doesn’t really work for a coaster.

Surprise! It’s not beer — in the same glass bowl as all the coasters, I found this pocket-sized Bacardi recipe book from 1971. Despite including a woman on the cover, it refers to the host as a “he” throughout and takes a full page to explain that Bacardi is NOT sweet, it’s actually dry. Overlooking these faults (as well as the egg-forward “Bacardi Tom and Jerry” recipe), I always appreciate a petite printed booklet.

Thanks for reading! And thank you again to Ben for having such a good eye for design. I’ll be back soon to share more goodies. 🆗