Planet Smasher - Pale Ale

The inaugural label art for the Dastardly Villain Artist Series was done by my 17 year old daughter Delilah Tackaberry. It doesn't get much more local than that! I gave her a bad pencil sketch I had drawn and this was the result. She likes to work with digital art, and spends much of her spare time designing comic book characters. She has a flair for art done in the anime style. Her future plans might be to study art at the local college, do some freelance work, or become a tattoo artist. Her work her shows a flair for colour and bold striking lines in her design. We love it! It is a big departure from our core beer can designs.

We decided to start our series off with a pretty basic common style - American Pale Ale. To make it more interesting, we decided to make it a S.M.A.S.H. brew (Single Malt And Single Hop). This is where the beer is made with only one grain, instead of a blend of malts, and only one style of hop instead of a blend of hops, which acts to provide the aroma, flavour and bitterness through different stages of additions. So Jacob got to work on recipes and I got to work on names, listings, etc...

So I had come up with two working names, and a bunch of other bad ideas. In discussions about the recipe, 4 hops came up a possible candidates for this beer. One of them was Comet! Since Planet Smasher was already 1 of two different names I had picked - it seemed to be the perfect fit. After all, comets smash planets! And it stands to reason that our spokesvillain, one Dr. P. D. McDastardly, would devise a devious plan threatening to pull a comet off course and smash the planet with it unless his outrageous ransom demands were met! (Where did you think Dr. Evil learned about Preparation H?)

Plus, at the time we were planning all this evil, NASA had directed their D.A.R.T. satellite into a comet to see if the mass of the collision could deviate the comet's trajectory. Well they successfully did it, and in so doing dashed the plans of our heinous spokesvillain, Dr. P. D. McDastardly! (True story too! About NASA that is....)

FOOTNOTE: We decided after the success of this project to make a followup S.M.A.S.H. beer project. We brought Delilah back to design the follow up beer label for Attack of the Planet Smasher. See the art for that one further on. We eventually plan to do a few more in the series.

Maybe afterwards Delilah can do the art for the animated series.....