Home is where the heart is: Blackjack Brew Co’s brand by Ensemble gives the brewery a sense of place

For Blackjack Brew Co, home is everything. The 12-year-old brewery that was “proudly started and housed in a historical but forgotten part of Manchester, Angel Meadow, has something that most other breweries of 12 years don’t have – a heritage story, not of our beer, but our neighbourhood,” says Blackjack Brew Co’s Co-owner Rich Fowell. The company also sits in a unique spot within the brewery landscape – it’s proud of its traditional ales that speak of history, but it also embraces the progressive world of craft beer. It needed an identity that would capture its considered balance of heritage and modernity, and would also help it shrug off its association with casinos and gambling, while placing the focus squarely on its home ground, Angel Meadow. They needed a partner who understood not just this intention, but also the place, and so its team called on their Manchester neighbour Ensemble. The studio began with deconstructing the old brand to make sure it didn’t throw away anything valuable and dove deep into the sector to identify the opportunity for the brewery to stand out. “This essentially boiled down to – their mascot, the Jack, the use of clear space, not conforming to popular trends of full bleed patterns all the time, maintaining heritage and tradition and finally finding a balance between old and new,” Co-founder Martin Power tells us. Since the Jack had sometimes led consumers to associate the brewery with gambling, Ensemble decided to flip the script, turning it into a character to build a narrative around. “In our research, we looked into the many iterations of ‘Blackjacks,’ uncovering the first known impression in card form. This led us to the original instance of ‘the Jack,’ where he represented ‘the Knave of coins,’ which meant ‘dishonest,’” Power explains. “This, paired with the Angel Meadow’s dark past of Scuttler gangs, led us to create the storyline of ‘the Jack’ as a character of fable who wandered the Meadow, sharing stories of his travels with the local people. We played down the dishonesty, and focused more on creating a character based on the unknown.” The original graphic of the Jack that the brewery used was cluttered and big, so the team simplified its form, arriving at a simple, sharp design that wouldn’t lose its essence in smaller applications, such as cans and pump clips.