Omega Yeast is a yeast manufacturer serving craft brewers, and the team there is exceptionally good at what they do. Their R&D lab answers thousands of brewer questions a year, and behind every product is a mountain of experimentation that almost never leaves the building. Omega's owners, Mark and Lance, wanted to change that. Their idea was an education arm called Top Crop: a place to share the research, recipes, and thinking the company was already doing, without turning it into a sales channel. What they needed was a brand that could carry genuinely technical content without feeling like a textbook, and a visual system that didn't look like anything else in craft beer.

Services Brand Identity Website + Digital Design Print Design Artwork + Illustration

Credits Mark Schwarz + Lance Shaner, Co-founders Kyle Eertmoed, Brand Design Director Dexter Stevens, Designer Kyle Romberg, Illustrator Shana Solarte, Writer Laura Burns, R&D Contributor Danielle Sommer, Editor Lisa Beck, Photographer

Recognition STA100 Award Winner 2024 North American Guild of Beer Writers Award for Best Technical Writing, Shana Solarte 2024 Craft Beer Marketing Platinum Crushie Award for Best Website

A project about craft deserved something you could hold. We reprinted each major release of digital content as a broadsheet newspaper and distributed it at industry events out of custom refurbished newspaper dispenser machines, handed out on conference floors like a morning edition. After the event, leftover copies sold on the site for an old-school 50¢. They sold out fast enough that we had to do a second print run. The papers did something the website couldn't. They turned a knowledge-sharing initiative into an artifact, something brewers would carry home and keep on a shelf. More than any other part of the project, they're the thing people still talk about.