(high energy ska music)
- Ska is a type of music that originated in Jamaica
in the late 50s.
(high energy ska music)
It's a very danceable, upbeat, kind of blend of
traditional Caribbean rhythms and some Western Music.
My name's David Thibodeau,
and I'm the President and co-founder of Ska Brewing.
My brewing experience came out of high school,
and when we were in high school we were punk rock kids,
and kind of started getting really into ska music.
It kind of became our thing, so when we were home brewing,
we weren't listening to ska,
the home brew wouldn't turn out good.
So, when we actually came to starting the brewery,
we thought, hey, you know, what are we gonna call it?
We went with what we loved and what we were passionate about
and that was ska music, it was comic books,
and of course beer.
I think a beer needs a story.
- [Man] One, two, one, two, there, four.
- The story is our battle against Rotgutzen,
International Beverage Corporation.
And you can decide what brewery or giant brewery
conglomerate that means to you.
So, it became an epic battle of good versus evil,
and ska versus Rotgutzen,
and that's the story in the comic book.
(high energy ska music)
When we first started, this is mid-80s,
there wasn't digital printing yet,
so we did everything, because it was all on a press,
so it was really cheap to do things in one color
which is the cool thing about the second wave of ska music,
is that's also known as the Two Tone Era
and it was all about black and white checkers.
The Two Tone was a record label in England,
the idea was that there was working class white kids
and black kids that were forming these bands together,
so, the black and white and the checkers
represented the unity between the races,
then these guys were forming these bands.
Fortunately for us at the time when we had no money
and we were starting this brewery,
it was a lot cheaper to just print black on white paper.
Think my favorite label is our Modus Hoperandi.
It's Pinstripe, once again, the CEO of Rotgutzen,
and he's walking down Main Street in Durango
two other of his thugs, side by side.
You know, it's weird, 'cause there's
a skeleton with two humans, you have to know
that there's something more there when you look at it.
No one would just draw that for no reason.
The characters that are in the comic book
are the characters and the names of our beers,
all showing kind of like piecemeal parts of our comic book.
That's just been our marketing platform.
Mr. Pinstripe is the CEO of Rotgutzen,
and he's the skeleton you see everywhere
and his lead thug us Buster.
And so, it's a nut brown ale, so it's Buster Nut Brown,
obviously the name ties to the beer.
It also ties, it has some ska music ties,
Buster Blood Vessel is the name of
the lead singer of one of our favorite bands, Bad Manners.
We tie everything together, so,
it's a ska band, it's the beer style,
it's the lead thug in our story.
The guy that developed our logo,
our Ska Brewing checkered logo,
and our first True Blonde logo and Pinstripe logo
is a local tattoo artist here in Durango.
His name is Matt Rousseau, Your Flesh Tattoo
is his tattoo studio.
- I think my approach is more just coming up with
something that represented their concept and
kind of just what I thought would look cool,
'cause back then there weren't many other cool beer labels,
and they wanted to do something unique and creative
that was totally unlike anything else that the beer industry
was doing and so I think that kind of gave me the freedom
to really try and do what I was into and what I thought
they would be stoked on.
- Artists might not wanna be associated
with a giant corporation.
I think you're seeing an evolution of this
where artists are working more with brands
because they're like-minded people.
Business, if like-minded, might be a type
like a young artist wants to associate themselves with,
and they could provide a platform for this artist
to really show their work and being able to integrate it
through different sorts of media.
It's the only way, now.
I think we overthink it.