What imagery do you associate with craft beer? Hop cones? Beards? Skulls? The first two make sense but the third is, on reflection, a puzzle.
In a craft beer bar in Burgas, Bulgaria, the other week, we realised that there were no fewer than 17 images of skulls surrounding us.
They were on the walls, in the form of chalk art and graffiti murals, and on beer packaging – including the can on our table.
This reminded us that a few years ago a lot of new entrants into the craft beer market also leaned heavily on skull imagery.
One particularly notable example was Pistonhead, which launched as a faux-craft sub-brand in 2011 by old skool Swedish brewery Spendrups.
As we drank our skull-adorned Bulgarian craft beer, two questions formed in our minds:
- Where did this association between skulls and craft beer start?
- What does it mean?
We love digging back through the archives to pin down how certain trends developed and who has the strongest claims to be first.
You might take note of Orkney Skull Splitter, an award-winning beer with ‘skull’ in its name – but no skull on its label, because it’s actually a dual reference to (a) viking axes and (b) hangovers. It was first brewed, we believe, in 1989.
There’s also Laughing Skull, a pilsner first brewed in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, in the late 1990s until 2005, and then revived as an amber ale after 2009. This one did and does have a skull on the label.
But it seems fairly clear that the skull obsession in craft beer began in earnest with Beavertown in around 2011, via its in-house designer Nick Dwyer.
In various interviews, like this one from 2012, Dwyer talks about his designs as “psychedelic” and mentions Mars Attacks! as a specific influence.
The article linked above also says “They have their roots in old drawings of robots with rib cages”.
In other words, these particular designs arose from Nick Dwyer’s own interests and obsessions – from the kind of things he liked to draw and doodle.
Before they were dragged into beer, however, skulls were already popular in other areas of hipsterish culture.
In tattoo art, for example, skulls have been among the most popular icons for decades.
A recent book called Skull Session collects examples of skull tattoo designs from the collection of Lyle Tuttle, with some dating back to the 1950s, and many examples which wouldn’t look at all out of place on a beer can.
There’s also a tradition of skull iconography in biker culture, in American punk music, and skateboarding. In his 2011 book Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation David A. Ensminger writes:
Images of skulls and skeletons are omnipresent in [1980s American] punk flyers, which might reveal the influence of skate-core bands like Suicidal Tendencies and their zealous homemade fans who made countless skull shirts… but also the art of Mad Marc Rude (Mis-fits, Battalion of Saints, Christ on Parade), Push-ead (Septic Death, Corrosion of Conformity), or Shawn Kerri (Germs). Most likely, the roots relate to the 1978 skull-and-dagger graphic designed for the (Powell-Peralta) Ray “Bones” Rodriguez [skateboard] deck by V. Courtland Johnson. Similar skull designs were omnipresent on Powell-Peralta [skateboards] throughout the mid-1980s…
He tracks this back further to Los Angeles gang art which, in turn, might have been influenced by Mexican folk art.
There’s a whole strain of alternative street culture here that British breweries were tapping into, consciously or otherwise, in the 2000s and 2010s, as an antidote to the folksy conservativeness represented by CAMRA and real ale.
For BrewDog that meant simply writing PUNK on their products, and shouting it a lot.
For Beavertown and others, the approach was slightly more subtle. They created label designs that wouldn’t look out of place on a skateboard, on stickers, on T-shirts, or in ink on skin.
What skull imagery means in the context of beer
David Ensmiger, quoted above, suggests that in the context of punk music and skateboarding, skulls and skeletons represent a certain ‘apartness’ from mainstream culture.
To paraphrase his argument, skaters, punks and bikers are monsters created by society, who delight in horrifying and repulsing ‘normies’.
There’s also a more obvious sense in which skull imagery is about confronting death, and embracing life. People who fly skull flags see themselves as fearless risk takers, in both physical terms (skateboarding accidents hurt) and in terms of their cultural status.
Again, this is exactly the kind of attitude craft beer producers either wanted to tap into (appropriate) or which actually reflected their lifestyles.
In the latter case, Weird Beard Brew Co., launched in 2013, springs to mind.
Its logo incorporated a bearded skull which rather resembled Bryan Spooner, one of the founders and head brewer until 2024. Both he and his co-founder, Gregg Irwin, were fans of metal music – another hotbed of skull imagery.
But skulls didn’t become potent images in the 1970s, of course. Consider the ‘memento mori’, for example, as explained in this article from the Science Museum website:
A memento mori is an object that serves to remind the viewer of the inevitability of their death and the brevity of life. ‘Memento mori’ is a Latin phrase that translates to ‘remember you must die.’ … Ancient Romans would reflect on their own mortality at banquets and feasts. At some feasts, every guest would be presented with a small memento mori.
As regular consumers of beer, a substance that is bad for us, we often find ourselves pondering on the balance between enjoying life and prolonging it. If we gave up beer altogether, we might live longer. But as we’re only here for a short while, why should we deny ourselves pleasure?
Perhaps we might see the skulls we encounter on craft beer packaging as an everyday mass market memento mori. Life is fleeting – treat yourself.
And the memento mori is also a symbol of defiance: we look death in the eye sockets as we knock a few hours off the span of our lives with every session.
