Telephone Lines

The details: Finback Brewery  Telephone Lines Pilsner, 5.2% ABV, served in a pint can

Continuing the month of interesting design this week with a beer I picked up at the source a few weeks ago. I'm sad I didn't get to sit down and enjoy it earlier, but alas life got in the way.

A few Sundays ago me and two friends ended up biking out to Queens to visit Finback Brewery first hand. Id' always wanted to go, but it always felt deceptively far. It's not really accessible by the subway; well to be honest you could take either the M to the end and walk, the L to Halsey Street and walk more, or take the J to 85th Street and have to walk through a park and/or a cemetery. After one trip I can say with some certainty that biking there is far and away the easiest way to visit.

So we arrived on a Sunday afternoon around 2 or so and as we roll up we notice a handwritten sign on the door: tap room closed for a private event. Usually the large print giveth and the small print taketh away, but in this case the small print was the best: to go beer available until 4pm. We went inside and the bartender was nice enough to find us some mixed four packs (something they don't normally do, but they were random singles so what the hell) and the day was not a loss.

As soon as we walked up to the bar I started scanning for interesting cans. Finback has a great aesthetic overall with their design: Their logo of name and whale is (as far as I can tell) always silver. Their labels are stick on and they don't take up the entire size of the can (here's an example). I'm really in to the recent movement of buying plain cans and putting your own labels on them. The design I was most drawn to was called Telephone Lines. 

As a little bit of backstory, throwing shoes over power lines does not mean anything about drugs. That's pretty much been debunked. There are some places in the world where it does have meaning, but you can research that on your own. 

My favorite thing about this label is its use of the gradient tool in Photoshop. The shoes and lines on the label change colors from purple to green, and even though that seems like a pair of colors that wouldn't work well together, they do. Finback also keeps the text to a minimum, in stark contrast to last weeks beer. It's really pretty to look at.

The pilsner inside is no slouch either. It's crispy and just a hit sweet. It smells fresh - this will be hard to describe, but you know how sometimes if you open an American adjunct lager and it smells like it's been sitting in the can for just a little too long? This is the opposite of that. It's got this clean smell that I really enjoy. It hangs around on the tongue a little longer than I'd love, but that's representative of the style. I'd bike over to Queens for this (and many other) Finback beer anytime.

The verdict: 4.0 out of 5 (on Untapp'd - follow me @slownumbers to see what I'm drinking!)