The Icons Range

Now that we have a platform to build a more meaningful brewery to customer relationship in the form of our blog, we wanted to bring some of the spotlight onto a branch of the brewery that we feel has perhaps been lacking in a little bit of direction since its inception, our Polly’s Icons Range. So to add a little bit of context, let’s take things back to the very beginning. Back in 2019 we pulled the trigger on what we christened the Augment range here at Polly’s. A step up in our very young brewing journey at the time to advance our beers to the next level by letting the reins completely off; initially amplifying up our pale and hoppy beers but with an eye for branching out to more experimental styles for the brewery – starting with sours upon the advent of Lally joining the team, and continuing to innovate with the launch of our first barrel-aged beers coinciding with our fifth anniversary toward the end of 2022.

The Augment range has continued to hit some ever-increasing high watermarks since its inception four years ago in tandem with our own technological advancements here at the brewery, but the most recognisable and most highly sought after remain to be the original three beers we launched with – Patternist, Spur, and Rosa. The original Augment trio were certified game changers for our then-flourishing brewery, and prior to the launch of the Icons range, were amongst some of our most frequently requested and executed rebrews, which we were keen to sate people’s thirst for whenever we could. Fast forward to 2022, and with demand reaching fever pitch for our most popular beers to be brewed on a consistent basis thanks to the huge success of the Polly’s Core Range, we came up with and commissioned the concept of the Polly’s Icons Range. A celebration of our ability to nail one of the key components to any successful brewery in consistency, Patternist, Spur, Rosa and Oh My became semi-permanent features of our output from Spring 2022 onward.

Whilst it always felt natural to hand the spotlight to the original three, the question remained open about what should fill the fourth slot on this new range. It felt correct and sensible to have a pale ale option introduced to proceedings, but how did the selection process ultimately yield Oh My as our fourth beer? A mixture of our own market research via Google Forms, gauging customer opinion via face to face interaction thanks to our incredible sales team putting their boots on the ground through repeated days in trade, and checking through customer feedback on beer rating websites such as Untappd and Ratebeer lead us to believe the strongest candidate would be Oh My. After getting the blessing from our pals over in Chamonix, Big Mountain, Oh My joined and completed the lineup, and we feel this beer holds just as much weight as our original trio in terms of reputation and quality of liquid in the glass itself. 

Okay, so we’ve got the lineup pinned down, how do we go about creating a defining look for a new range? One of the fundamental parts of our success here at Polly’s has landed squarely on the design of our cans, and we wanted to maintain the typical Polly’s branding, but unique to this range in particular. Wanting to deliberately give our Icons a more identifiable look, we toyed with the idea of 330ml labels on 440ml cans – as we had done in the very very early days of our Augment range – however due to space limitations and the amount of text we have to implement to make the beer sellable with our overseas partners, we discarded this idea pretty quickly. Instead, we’ve inverted the design from our usual photographic backgrounds with monocolour droplet logo to a silver label, with the original artwork for each inside the droplet logo itself; the idea being to present these beers as a premium-level core range, with the glint of light that bounces from the largely silver label creating a “precious metal” kind of vibe which we really dig.

As we do with every single one of our brews here at Polly’s, great care is taken to ensure that consistency is maintained throughout our entire brewing process – we follow a very strict recipe management procedure here at the brewery to ensure that each batch of our Icons range is identical to the next, and the beer hitting your glass is as good as it possibly can be every time. We also hold frequent sensory panels with our brew, sales, and senior management teams to nail down and note any inconsistencies between brews that need to be addressed. All of this great care and attention to detail is why we feel that Oh My, Patternist, Spur, and Rosa are amongst the most technically nailed on recipes across the entire Polly’s output – and whilst I crack open my own can of Rosa upon closing this one out, long may our Icons range continue.