Within Design Studio makes Meneer Bommel the charming outsider of cider

Meneer Bommel is a wild fermented cider that keeps changing after it’s sealed. Pressed from apples and pears grown in the Bommelerwaard in the Netherlands and left to ferment on wild yeasts, it carries on evolving in the bottle, so no two pours are quite the same – dry, lively and a little unpredictable. It began as an experiment between two friends who wanted to make something from what was already around them. “On a course to learn how to make cider, we met a guy with a beautiful old and well-kept orchard who didn’t know what to do with his apples,” Co-founder Maarten Bolt recalls, the fruit coming from trees approaching a century old, grown pesticide-free. Batch after batch followed, each one different from the last. “Every harvest is different; it’s rewarding to anticipate the unpredictability,” he adds. For the identity, Meneer Bommel turned to Amsterdam-based Within Design Studio, with a brief that was intentionally unfussy. “We wanted the identity to be friendly, accessible and timeless,” Bolt explains, the aim being to match the experience of the cider itself – “enjoying a drink that is a bit different but accessible.” It’s a dry cider, fully fermented and something of an acquired taste, aimed at curious palates and bound for delicatessens, craft beer shops and farmers’ markets. In a drinks category that tends to be polished, sharp and serious, the studio has cast Meneer Bommel as the charming outsider and set out to build the brand on character rather than perfection, carrying the cider’s unpredictability through everything around it. At the centre of it sits Meneer Bommel himself, a hand-drawn character entirely at home among the apple trees, whose look took its cue from Eric Carle, the author and illustrator of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. “I love the naivety and play in his work. There’s something so tactile about the imperfections,” Founder & Creative Director Liam Houlihan reflects, suspecting Meneer Bommel would be a fan of Carle’s too. “The character personality is super organic. We started by imagining what a day in this guy’s life looks like,” he tells us – lunch with his chicken, an afternoon floating around on his boat, a nap under the tree. With that world mapped out, the studio reached for pens and pencils. “We wanted the result to carry the quality of ink on paper, so we avoided over-correcting when vectorised for print,” he details.