La Roja

Where to even start with this one. There’s a brewery in Detroit that I hear is amazing, I’ve never been but a good friend who is a connoisseur of both whiskey and beer says it’s excellent. It’s called Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales, and if you get a chance you should stop by one of their several locations. The part that piqued my interest was when I learned they had teamed up with a local tattoo artist, Adam Forman, to design their labels. Things got really fun once I realized he had created an entire set of characters that you could follow their stories across the labels, which is it’s own internet clickhole of amazingness.

My friend was obsessed with a painting someone had done of the La Roja cat from one of the series of labels, which hangs on the wall in their Detroit location, and always said he was going to get it somehow one day until he remembered I was an artist and commissioned his own painting. The part of the story he loves is the part where the La Roja cat is an old Spanish sea captain who has fallen on hard times, and has been turned out in the streets with a bum sack over his shoulder holding a mouse for his dinner, wearing a bicorn cap. Hence the origins of this painting, which took more than a year to complete and several iterations with hidden characters from other labels and one very special mermaid if you know exactly where to look.

Moral of the story: Go to the brewery. Admire their original painting. Maybe get a tattoo from Adam Foreman in Ann Arbor. Tell me how the beer is, it’s been a while since I’ve made it up to Detroit.