What do you do on the day you release the cultiest of cult beers in a special-edition can designed by an illustrator-artist with a growing following? You call the cops.

Tree House Brewing in the western Massachusetts town of Monson did just that recently to control the throngs descending on its dirt parking lot over the latest sporadic release of a beer called the Juice Machine. Craft beer drinkers are fanatical about this six-year-old rural brewery, the entirety of whose sales come from its on-premise retail store. It produces 14 of the 50 highest-rated beers on BeerAdvocate.

Like most Tree House beers, the Juice Machine is an American double IPA: very hoppy, very potent—and also very hazy according to what some consider a distinct, Northeast IPA sub-style associated with Tree House and its sought-after eastern-Mass peer Trillium.

Unlike most Tree House beers, the Juice Machine comes in a can with a robot on it. “I redid the robot from Lost in Space—he’s possessed by the beer and the fruit,” says illustrator and craft-beer fan Dean McKeever. The “fruit” is a play on both the prominent citrus and tropical notes associated with uber-hopped American IPAs, and the fact that these beers are so opaque they resemble orange juice.

“People flip out for [the Juice Machine],” says McKeever. He recalls the parking lot looking “like a Patriots game” when it was last released.

No. 29, photo by Nate Lanier

There’s also a fair amount of flipping out happening over Tree House’s Curiosity beers—single-release brews named simply after their number in the sequence. There have been 35 so far, and McKeever, who earned a bachelor of fine arts at UMass-Dartmouth in 2008, has designed unique labels for each release beginning with number 18.

Number 32, photo by Nate Lanier

He collaborates with Tree House brewer and cofounder Nate Lanier on the ideas for the cans. Dean Rohan, another cofounder, says, “They have a little bit of a theme behind them: They’re natural, woodsy.” And they are truly collector’s items, as evidenced by the robust online trade of Curiosity cans, whether they’re full or empty. Tree House no longer announces the release of these beers because of the aforementioned crowd-control issues.

Number 18, photo by Nate Lanier

The Curiosity cans are more representative of McKeever’s style, which is rooted in nature: mountains, trees, cabins emitting wisps of chimney smoke. He names both Van Gogh and Bob “The Joy of Painting” Ross as inspirations. “I’m inspired by vintage elements, illustrations from the ‘50s and ‘60s,” he says. “I try not to beat my work to death with too much color or line work.” At the same time, he adds, “I try to create a lot of depth—the illusion that there’s three dimensions.” All of these influences and intentions came together as the Curiosity series entered its thirties.

“I’m really stoked to be a freelance artist,” McKeever says. “A lot of it is because of my connection with Tree House.”

Number 25, photo by Nate Lanier

McKeever lives in East Longmeadow, only about a half-hour drive from Monson. (Tree House is building a second facility in Charlton that will greatly expand its capacity.) When he’s not designing labels for Tree House or other breweries—including Tioga Sequoia in California and Haint Blue in Alabama—he designs skateboard decks for Theory in Northampton and Hoodlum in Hartford, and shows his prints around western Massachusetts.

Check out McKeever’s work at Beerology in Northampton and at the Made in Massachusetts Festival at the Big E July 8 and 9. Or check him out on Instagram, where the artist’s Wednesday night “live draws” have a growing audience.

Dean McKeever–illustrator
Easthampton, Massachusetts
Website
Instagram
Facebook
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Images by Nate Lanier

The post The Art of the Can appeared first on Take Magazine.

Scene: Busy coffeeshop just after dusk. Location: Northampton, MA. In walks a bedraggled, white-bearded, black coffee-swilling, grump-meister named Tom Pappalardo. His laptop is scratched, stickered, and held together with a clamp. He looks like Liam Neeson about to do someone some very serious damage. “I used to be a semi-professional curmudgeon,” he says, “but now it’s more of a persona. I think I’m actually much nicer than I used to be.”

Pappalardo, an Easthampton, MA-based graphic designer, musician, and longtime comic book artist (Everything You Didn’t Ask For, 2014), has written, designed, and, through his new press, Object Publishing, self-published One More Cup of Coffee (2016), an observational compendium of his visits to coffee shops throughout Western Massachusetts. The book really doesn’t have anything to do with coffee, except insofar it’s the liquid folks gather around to talk life, death, and pretty much everything else in between. Tom visits these spots, gets himself a cup of their darkest coffee, sets his back to the wall and just listens. The locales range from classic New England coffee shops like Shelburne Falls Coffee Roasters, to supermarkets (Trader Joe’s), to the most ubiquitous of middle-America coffee sellers like Dunkin’ Donuts and a Starbucks inside Barnes and Noble.

“It came about as a way for me to get out of the house,” Pappalardo explains. “I made a list of places, some of which I’d been a regular at for years, then others – hey how come I don’t go there?” He developed a following writing weekly Facebook updates of his observations, which became about 90% of the book, “though,” he promises, “the book is much better edited.” The book’s subtitle, “In Which the Author Barely Talks About the Coffee” was by design. “A lot of the Facebook fans thought they were café reviews. I’ve lived in the area for 20 years, I knew a lot of the owners. I wanted it to be clear that this wasn’t an extended Yelp review.”

Instead, Pappalardo reviewed the customers inside the shops, telling their stories through his story, which is most often full of rage at the base foolishness of our entire culture. With lines like “I’m trying to be less of an asshole,” it’s clear that Pappalardo enjoys being a character in his own book. It also allows him to offer up some wickedly brutal assessments of the most mundane or overwrought conversations.

Behind Pappalardo’s umbrage is the sense that we’ve lost touch with being, and feeling, part of a larger community. “Even folks our age or older are blindered and not mindful of what’s going on around them,” he says.” A big part of this book was a mindfulness exercise. I’m going to a place just to observe. I try to make it as funny as I can, because that’s the genre I work in.”

Tom Pappalardo | Photo by David Nielsen

Though it seems the antithesis of his old-school coffee shop haunting, Pappalardo also made One More Cup of Coffee available on Kindle, a move that strips it of its design, physicality, and character. It’s a sign of the times, one he acknowledges with a wince. “I’m more interested in the object  of the book,” Pappalardo explains. “I just wanted to make a nice book. It’s the same with albums vs MP3s. I’m certainly from that era where I remember growing up and buying a cassette at the mall. You’d sit and listen to it and read along with all the lyrics. You build a connection to the album. I’m also a graphic designer; you can’t have an album without a cover. So yeah, to me this is the closest I get to art, whereas the Kindle version is the raw data. If someone wants to consume that, that’s fine—I’m not going to stop them. But the book is way cooler.”

Follow Tom Pappalardo on-line, on Instagram, and multiple Facebook pages:
personal | graphic design | writing & things, etc.

Illustration by Tom Pappalardo

The post Sit. Sip. Scrutinize. Scribble. appeared first on Take Magazine.