Most of St Erhard’s competitors trade on Bavaria’s rich legacy of brewing, using blackletter type and old fashioned illustration to firmly ground their product in the visual language of the region’s past. St Erhard wanted to break from that tradition and do something different that was still clearly steeped in German design traditions.

The Bauhaus school of design is replete with typographic and geometric designs that are distinctly German, signifying Germanic heritage without feeling tired or clichéd. In the world of Bavarian beer branding, links to the Bauhaus are nonexistent, and their angular shapes and primary colours presented the perfect palette with which to modernise the St Erhard brand.

Each of St Erhard’s premium brews — Farmer, Mayflower and Saison — was assigned its own colour and geometric shape and a custom-drawn type treatment in which letters were reduced down to their most elemental forms. The influence of the Bauhaus extended right through to the production methods with foil blocked labels nodding to the school’s considered craft.