Burgeon Beer Brings Their Cans to Life With CanCraft
Greetings, Aluminum Enthusiasts! Let’s all give a warm welcome to Mackenzie Kline, Marketing Director for Burgeon Beer. Launched in 2016 out of lovely San Diego, California, Burgeon Beer currently boasts four locations across America’s Finest City, where they’re known for flavorful IPAs and sharp eye-catching packaging. We sat down with Mackenzie to learn how CanCraft’s team of full-service packaging experts has helped Burgeon grow and evolve in a dynamic market. If you’re curious about tapping into your brand’s potential with CanCraft, bottoms up!
BSG: Hey Mackenzie! Thanks so much for making time to chat! What can you tell us about Burgeon Beer?
Mackenzie: Burgeon was founded by three local San Diego guys who all went to high school together. Since 2020 we’ve been growing quickly and steadily. Our flagship location and production facility is located in Carlsbad — so North County, San Diego. We have tasting rooms in Escondido and Downtown in Little Italy. Each taproom has its own personality and establishing ourselves here in our hometown has always been important to us. San Diego is at our core. We love our community here.
If you’ve seen our logo, it represents three principles that are core to our brand: Craft beer is at the center; the Roots represent our community; and the tree itself stands in for our passion for protecting our planet. We’re working on our carbon-neutral certification right now, and we should have that in the next month. I’m grateful that we as a company can think about our footprint and create delicious beers without making a negative impact.
BSG: Could you tell us how Burgeon came to partner with CanCraft?
Mackenzie: We were working with a different label provider for Sleeved Cans. They were wonderful and they were local. But we needed to increase production of several core brands and transition them to Printed Cans – for improved quality and reliability.
Working with CanCraft allows us to have a blended model with some sleeved cans and some printed cans in the mix. It’s the most cost-effective solution for us, and for our core brands. It also lets us keep up a super-aggressive schedule of one-offs. Right now, we release two new brands every two weeks, which is quite a lot.
BSG: We’d love to see some samples of the work you’ve done together.
Mackenzie: Of course. Let’s look at Treevana IPA. For us, Treevana is The Beer. We want this to be the IPA of San Diego. We’re always experimenting with new recipes to find the sweet spot with our core brands, but this recipe has stuck around. People love this beer and working with CanCraft has helped us tweak and refine design elements to improve the label.
All of our brands start in sleeves. If they become part of our core lineup, they transition to printed cans. One thing we try to incorporate is the can show-through – for example, the aluminum tree line here at the bottom. You see a tree and think green. We wanted to flip that on its head. Working with CanCraft means we can have those little pops and accents that distinguish a brand; we can have depth between the matte finish and the full-flood ink. These elements are all balanced, and it’s just a super-clean look. It illustrates the beer in a way that’s unusual and still recognizable on the shelf.
BSG: Love it! Let’s see another.
Mackenzie: A few years ago, we ran a “Reclaim the Wild Project” in partnership with the National Forest Foundation. For every pint we sold, we planted a tree in an America’s National Forests. Reclaim the Sea IPA takes that land-forestation concept and puts it in the ocean. We partnered with Sea Trees, an awesome global organization that researches and restores coastal kelp and mangrove forests.
From a design perspective, we’ve talked about aluminum show-through already. By knocking out pieces from the white layer and also having a colorful CMYK layer, we get colorful metallic pops on the can. We’re not limited to specific gold foil, bronze, or copper. You can really bring your can to life. On this can we used a spot white layer on the background to achieve a pretty teal ocean – a shimmery backdrop to contrast with the kelp forest.
BSG: What’s important to you in a packaging partner?
Mackenzie: Reliability, Quality, Customer Service, and Cost. This is how we decide who we work with. We have a small but mighty team, and we want to work with brands we respect and can learn from.
Being able to establish a process with CanCraft and rely on it – from proofing to purchase orders – this allows us to plan our entire year. We know we’re in the queue, we know how much time we have, and we know when our cans will arrive. We’ve dealt with delays elsewhere and being able to trust CanCraft is huge. We wouldn’t be able to grow without a calendar we can trust.
I also love CanCraft’s transparency in communication. When CanCraft switched printers due to a quality issue, we were informed about potential obstacles and given time to prepare for any extra proofing the move could entail. When we received a hard proof of a sleeved can for color-matching, the new can looked even better than the old one. The colors were more vibrant. From where I’m sitting, CanCraft is always improving and trying to deliver an even better product.
BSG: What’s next for Burgeon Beer? What are you excited about?
Mackenzie: We just launched a new webstore at Burgeonbeer.com to help Reclaim the Sea IPA reach an even wider audience across California. Orders over $75 ship free anywhere in the state!
BSG: Thanks again for all your time, Mackenzie! To see what CanCraft can do for your brand, get your hands on Burgeon Beer or contact us today!