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What do Beer, Birthdays, Design, and Facelifts Have in Common?

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What do Beer, Birthdays, Design, and Facelifts Have in Common?

A lot more than you might think. These sort of things don’t happen overnight, though, so give it a minute for everything to come together as you keep reading.

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We’ll celebrate our third birthday this Saturday on the famed 713 day that so many will be cheersing to, and that’s pretty special to us.

To celebrate our birthday, we want to celebrate the breweries that make our little website possible, so if you want to help us celebrate them, go vote right after you finish reading this because this article is also about celebrating. Kinda. It’s weird. Just stick with me.

I’m an artist – a brand designer by trade – and that means I help people shape public perception of their business using writing, design, digital media, and other consumer touch points. It’s a ton of fun, and I’m grateful for the ways I’ve been able to apply it to Beer Chronicle and the establishments that we serve.

When my very good friend Chris (my wife calls him boo #2) first asked me to start this site in the spring of 2016, I had no idea what it’d become, but I knew I was down like an anchor.

Write about Houston? And beer? And help tell the stories that they don’t have the time to because they’re making and selling beer!? And use design!!?

*pees on myself a little from sheer excitement*

This has also given me the opportunity to connect with a ton of awesome people, and that’s where the story really begins.

Mike Francis from Hop Drop, James (in the Radio) Simpson from What’s on Tap Radio, Leo and Garrison at SpindleTap… these guys have become friends of mine that I talk to more than some of my family members. Some of them have helped me out personally with encouragement in good times and condolences in some of the harder times.

I was eating lunch with James at Hughies the day I landed my biggest client ever, and I was chatting with Leo while I got a text a few weeks ago with some life-changing bad news, for example.

These guys are all linked to memories I’ve had over the last three years, and that’s pretty dang cool.

No one person deserves more recognition than Josh Olalde, though.

A bit of history for y’all: I hit him on Instagram randomly about a year ago (almost down to the day). I was putting together a list of Instagram beer accounts that you should follow (that I’ve still yet to publish) when I came across his photography and slid into his DMs like a 5-year-old on a slip-n-slide.

I was stunned and pleased and grateful all at once.

I congratulated him on what he’d done so far and told him to keep it up, but I didn’t expect anything else. He replied and we started chopping it up like we’d been friends for years.

The Instagram DMs went back and forth for a couple of weeks, and eventually, he asked me to go out for a beer one day.

I like beer, and he didn’t seem like a total psychopath, so I obliged.

We sat on the back patio of the Backyard Grill and shared a couple of beers. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a sticky-humid day, and Josh was wearing a red flannel, while he and I sipped some Celis Wit and Platypus Grandaddy Purp as my son played in the sandbox.

Josh is a good guy. He genuinely means well in all he does, and his creativity is truly inspiring.

Pause.

This is more than a bromance story, and eventually, the connection between beer, birthdays, design, and facelifts will become apparent, but stick with me here.

Anyhow, when it was time to leave, I was waiting for him to ask me for something, and he didn’t. Being a very direct person, I even asked him, “So that’s it? No big ask? You really invited me out for a beer just to have a beer?”

He looked at me like I was speaking Chinese. His brow was bent and his head cocked with utter confusion.

“Uhh… Yeah, dude. What do you mean?”

I wasn’t sure what he wanted, but I was almost certain that he had an agenda. He didn’t. And that made me like him even more. Fast forward a few months, and he’s shooting photos for us and covering events like a BAMF.

So we’ve covered beer, and we’ve touched on design and birthdays, but what about facelifts?

Ingenious Brewing recently celebrated a birthday too! It was their first. Cheers to them. Now they’re looking into a facelift.

I’ve said it in the past that their labels don’t do their beer justice, and they listened. A month after writing that, their labels stepped up a notch, but it still wasn’t keeping up with the creativity they’re constantly churning out.

So I hit them up. I asked if they wanted some help.

I found out that owner Justin was split between 2 full-time jobs, a baby, other stressful stuff, and trying to manage all the creative work for Ingenious, and that’s when the facelift began.

Josh and I, and my good friend John Owen, have all been burning the midnight oil for the last 3 months putting together an Ingenious Brewing facelift that’ll hopefully live up to their wildly creative beers.

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So far, we’ve only done the website, but stay tuned for more. We’ll share some of the behind the scenes that went into it one of these days. For now, check out their new site (and check it out on a desktop for the most compelling experience). 😊

Beers to you, Houston! Now go vote!

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Anthony Gorrity
tony.d@beerchronicle.com

Anthony's a Houston native, a Creative Strategist at https://ledgeloungers.com/, an adjunct instructor of Visual Communication at Lone Star College, and a UH Coog that loves good beer almost as much as he does his city. Anthony lives to help others and that's found a home helping some of the coolest breweries on earth with creative and marketing projects that can be seen on our Portfolio page. Fueled by hoppy lagers, sessionable IPAs, and gangster rap, he's ticked his way through H-Town, rocking the most unusual Nikes he can find. When he's not writing for us, he's with his family or very patiently rooting for the Rockets.

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