Alchemy Cider Company

Craft cider has a sameness problem. The whole category reached for the same "heritage" cues, rustic labels, orchard imagery, warm nostalgia, until the shelf became a blur you can't tell apart at arm's length. Alchemy was never going to live there. Founder Kirk Evans came out of the Pacific Northwest beverage world with a specific and uncompromising vision: cider as something closer to ritual, drawn from the dark, mythic, metal-and-Belgian-beer world he'd been steeped in for years. He wanted a brand as impeccable as the cider, the kind that raises the hair on your arms. The challenge wasn't inventing a direction. It was taking a founder's fully-formed vision and building it into a complete brand system sharp enough to win in one of the best cider markets in the country.

We built Alchemy Cider Co. as a world, not a label. Working from Evans's meta-gothic vision, we turned cider into something with real mystery and myth to it, so the brand had somewhere to live beyond the bottle. We led the build across art direction, identity, illustration, packaging, and copywriting. The system is mythic on purpose. Custom typography with a dark, almost Trappist weight to it, detailed illustration, and a punchy, story-driven voice, all pulling in one direction so every piece feels like it came from the same strange and specific place. Black, gold, and emerald, apples treated like something conjured rather than harvested. It's ownable, instantly recognizable, and built to scale across a growing lineup of small-batch releases without losing the thread. The result cuts straight through the category's sameness. A cider brand nobody could mistake for another, distinctive enough to anchor a destination taproom in Portland's most competitive cider corridor. And the work earned an ADDY at the national level, the kind of recognition that says the thinking holds up well beyond its home market, on a brand a design-minded founder trusted us to get right.