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The Man Behind The Beer Label: Fast Company

Thinking and Drinking

Imagine having the job where you decide what breweries can and can’t put on the bottle and can.

Meet Kent “Battle” Martin, who Fast Company calls “the eccentric bureaucrat beer-label designers love to hate.”

As Fast Company writes:

“This year alone, 29,500 individually designed beer labels have been submitted for approval to the Trade Department’s Tax and Trade Bureau. And every single one of those label designs was approved or denied by a single man: Kent “Battle” Martin, a man who is the bane of the beer industry for his power to reject labels for the flimsiest of reasons.”

The story details how he’s rejected labels for everything ranging from depictions of Santa, images of a King of Hearts (because, Fast Company reports, “the heart implied that the beer would have a health benefit”), and a label featuring a hamburger because it might lead buyers to think the beer contained meat.

Read the whole Fast Company piece here.