What imagery do you associate with craft beer? Hop cones? Beards? Skulls? The first two make sense but the third is, on reflection, a puzzle.<\/p>\n
In a craft beer bar in Burgas, Bulgaria, the other week, we realised that there were no fewer than 17 images of skulls surrounding us.<\/p>\n
They were on the walls, in the form of chalk art and graffiti murals, and on beer packaging \u2013 including the can on our table.<\/p>\n This reminded us that a few years ago a lot of new entrants into the craft beer market also leaned heavily on skull imagery.<\/p>\n One particularly notable example was Pistonhead, which launched as a faux-craft sub-brand in 2011 by old skool Swedish brewery Spendrups.<\/p>\n As we drank our skull-adorned Bulgarian craft beer, two questions formed in our minds:<\/p>\n We love digging back through the archives to pin down how certain trends developed and who has the strongest claims to be first<\/em>.<\/p>\n You might take note of Orkney Skull Splitter, an award-winning beer with \u2018skull\u2019 in its name \u2013 but no skull on its label, because it\u2019s actually a dual reference to (a) viking axes and (b) hangovers. It was first brewed, we believe, in 1989.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also Laughing Skull, a pilsner first brewed in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, in the late 1990s until 2005, and then revived as an amber ale after 2009. This one did and does have a skull on the label.<\/p>\n But it seems fairly clear that the skull obsession in craft beer began in earnest with Beavertown in around 2011, via its in-house designer Nick Dwyer.<\/p>\n In various interviews, like this one from 2012<\/a>, Dwyer talks about his designs as \u201cpsychedelic\u201d and mentions Mars Attacks!<\/em> as a specific influence.<\/p>\n \n![\"A](\"https:\/\/boakandbailey.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/assorted_skulls_collage.jpg\")
![\"A](\"https:\/\/boakandbailey.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/pistonhead_lager.jpg\")
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