Behind the Label with… Samata
The beloved brewer of sour beers aims to refresh its look.
Four one-off cans from a recent event. / Image courtesy of Samata
When Supachote Chantanasuksilpa started making beers for his brand Samata, he had one thing in mind. “I wanted a big canvas [for my packaging],” he told me.
A graduate of the Academy of Art in San Francisco, Chote, as most know him, spent the better part of a decade building a career in design before he got into brewing.
He created film effects for Tony Jaa features. He worked on ads for iTunes and Hummer.
Chote doesn’t just have technical chops—he has an eye for design, a quality creative agencies lust over. It should come as no surprise that he wanted more space to play with the branding on his beer cans.
When Samata’s striking silver cans started showing up in fridges across Bangkok a few years ago, they were easy to spot for their size (500ml), as well as their sleek, clean labels. For his IPAs, Chote limited his palette to silver, black, and white, leaning on typography and text effects to capture your attention. For his signature sours, he added vibrant colors that reflected the flavors you could expect from the beer.
Now, however, Chote sees even more potential in his labels. He wants to give local artists a blank canvas to flex their creative muscles and fine-tune Samata’s look. That new mission began with a four-can collaboration revealed at a party held at Payaq Gallery in the Old Town two weeks ago.
Recently, I sat down with Chote to talk about brewing, branding, beer art, and what exactly he hopes by teaming up with Thai artists. It’s been a while since I’ve gone Behind the Label with anyone. Here’s a long overdue second installment in this budding series.
Grayscale gets a makeover
Samata has released more than 150 beers, including fruited sours in eye-opening flavors like pineapple-chocolate, berries and cream, and mayongchid (marian plum) cheesecake.
When I asked, out of all those options, which label he was most proud of, Chote didn’t hesitate to answer. “Five Hops, my New England IPA,” he told me. “That was the beer that put me on the map.”
As I mentioned above, Chote’s earliest releases leaned heavily on typography and Adobe suite effects. His Five Hops label features a fluid, sans serif font that says, in empty white text, exactly what you’re having: a New England IPA brewed with five different hops (and an excellent one to boot).
The label didn’t wow you with wild colors or noisy graphics. It went straight to the point with expert skill. Not unlike the easily identifiable art from the brand that inspired Chote to make hazy beers: Omnipollo.
“Omnipollo was one of the first to make hazy beers. I remember wondering how they got them to be that color, that texture,” he said. “The labels were simple but beautiful. They inspired me to make hazy IPAs. They inspired my design, too.”
If you look at Samata’s other IPAs, you’ll see that Chote followed the same blueprint for them all.
A small sample of Samata labels. / Image courtesy of Samata
The Mosaic Motueka label spells out the two hops in black font; Chote then used typographical effects to jumble the words in the center of your line of sight. Triple Idaho 7? The words “Triple Idaho 7” in black and stretched out, as if you’re staring blearily at the can after having one too many of the 7% hazy IPA.
Chote’s style has always been clear: handsome cans you would gravitate to, even if you couldn’t explain why. When he started experimenting with sours, he added splashes of color to reflect the ingredients but otherwise kept them noise-free, taking cues from Omnipollo again, as well as another source of inspiration, Mortalis.1
As great as the designs may be, Chote still thinks something is missing. “With some of my earlier releases, people might not have realized they were Samata beers,” he told me. “I want people to see my cans and know it’s my beer.”
Enter his ongoing solution: find one artist to create labels that have a clear, identifiable style.
New brewery means new opportunities
The search for Thailand’s Next Top Beer Artist coincides with another project on Chote’s plate. By the end of this year, his new brewing facility in Ram Intra will be up and running.
Since Samata’s sours don’t include hops, Chote was able to secure the same license as a cider- or mead-maker. In other words, there were fewer hoops to jump through to get the license. Soon, he’ll be able to increase his output to a couple thousand cans a month, up from the couple hundred he can currently produce.
Thanks to a regulation that forces brewers to send recipes to the excise department before they’re allowed to make their beers, Chote already has next year’s line-up in place. He will make two different sours a month, starting with Strawberry Shakes, a blend of strawberry, coconut, and vanilla. That adds up to 24 beers—24 chances to re-establish his identity with a new look, if he so chooses. And he just might.
The Strawberry Shakes can features a vivid but limited palette. You know exactly what you’re getting when you buy this beer.
Chote has always made a point of using fresh Thai produce in his beers. Even Choco Berry, his personal favorite Samata sour, gets a pop of bitterness from Thai cacao nibs. With output ramping up, he saw an opportunity to highlight his locavore leanings while also giving an artist a commercial canvas to showcase their skill.
“I want to put stories on the label. Not just, like, a slice of cake,” Chote told me.
He got a trial run in rebranding recently.
Three months ago, Chote approached Puck—a well-known street artist who has worked with Singha sodas and Tao Bin, the coffee machines you find around Bangkok—about designing a label for Samata. Puck said yes emphatically. He also suggested looping in three other artists and making collectible cans from four of Samata’s best-selling beers: Choco Berry, Green Colada, Fruit Party, and Raspberry Cheesecake.
Puck tapped a street artist known as Neow, a spray-painter who goes by Sorimeo, and his older brother, Songod66, or Son, to join him. Then, they all spoke to Thun Puchpen, or Trk. A street artist and Nike ambassador, Trk owns Payaq, a gallery set in a beautifully refurbished teakwood house down one of Rattanakosin’s shoulder-wide alleys—the little lanes you don’t know exist until a place like Payaq opens on it.
Suddenly, Chote’s cold-call to Puck had turned into something bigger: an exhibition-slash-beer release-slash-party, an event entirely new to Bangkok’s beer scene.
Four cans, four stories
Chote brought the artists together and had them try the beers. Each chose the ones they liked and developed a story to match the flavors and color palettes.
“Each can has its own story influenced by the beer,” said Chote. “But it’s their stories—not mine.”
The can release coincided with a month-long exhibition at Payaq Gallery.
Son wrote “Samata” in Thai in a vivid, mandala-like piece that spoke to the color of the pineapple, pink guava, passion fruit, strawberry, and vanilla Chote packs into Fruit Party.
Sorimeo, a street artist and DJ who usually spray-paints large murals, transformed the Raspberry Cheesecake can with a delicate, anime-like figure that showcased his knack for light and shadow.
Neow, according to Chote2, enjoys the occasional dalliance with weed. Naturally, he selected Green Colada, a beer that pours the color of Ecto Cooler and bursts with tropical flavors. His vivid label was like a Gorillaz music video with the psychedelics turned up to 11.
Neow’s design amplified Samata’s electric green sour.
Puck, meanwhile, took centered the Choco Berry design around a female character. The label was loaded with little details, including Puck’s iconic rabbit character, but it all meshed.
“Puck’s work reminded me of what you see on Great Notion’s cans,” Chote explained. “They build their labels around characters, with lots of details in the background.”
There was an even subtler tie-in with that rabbit, too. According to Chote, Puck had been Neow’s idol; he even has Puck’s trademark rabbit tattooed on him.
The collaboration was a hit. Puck’s cans sold out first—and fast—but all four were gone before the night ended. An event like this, I thought, represented what beer can offer beyond pleasant fuzzy feelings and something good to drink.
“Obviously, brewers can give farmers new opportunities [by buying their fruit, honey, or other produce],” Chote said, confirming my biases. “But we overlook what brewers can offer artists.”
Now that the Samata brewery is nearly open, Chote hopes it will serve as another platform to explore some of these creative opportunities.
“I’m trying to get [Puck, Neow, Sorimeo, and Son] to paint murals on the brewery walls,” he told me.
Most of all, he hopes to identify the right person to take the creative reins, an artist who can elevate Samata’s branding. If you witnessed the rebranding train wreck that was Tesco Lotus becoming Lotus’s, you’ll know that getting it right isn’t easy. But if you nail it with logos and labels consumers love—especially when you already have great products—success flows like a perfectly poured pint.
The New York-based brewery that specializes in the same kind of thick fruited sours as Samata.
And Neow’s own Instagram account…