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Well here it is, my pride and joy the Rattray's labels. This is the culmination of two and a half months in spare time and I'm really happy with how it turned out. For those of you who are big Rattray's fans I hope you enjoy!
A Little Background...
Like all my labels these started when I bought a tin of something, I happened to snag a few tins of Old Gowrie, HOTW and Marlin Flake off the good folks at MarsCigars. I was looking at the standard Rattray's round tins and trying to think up a way to spice them up a bit. I really like Rattray's branding but those round 50g tins just seemed so plain. At some point I was googling what Gowrie meant, it's the area in Scotland around Perth. This got me thinking it would be fun to combine each blend with the heraldic crest of different cities and towns in Scotland.
Old Gowrie was the test bed, mainly because it was really clear what area it's crest should be and that Perth had an really fantastic Agnus Dei style design. It took a while but when Gowrie was done I wanted to sprint through the rest, however I needed to figure out where all these blends were going to go first. So I made a big map...
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There were a couple of themes, if a blend had a number in it and not much else to go on I'd try and match it with a fitting crest. All the flake tobaccos I wanted to match with harbor towns/ship crests. The rest was either historically based or on a whim. I go into detail for each blend my reasoning down below if you're interested.
I need to take the time to credit a few communities that were instrumental in this process. The first is the fantastic
Heraldry Wiki, it's a huge repository of heraldic images and background information. Their section on the old
Kaffee HAG stamp collection books was a really great resource, especially the
British Isles page. I've also got to credit the amazing folks at
Wappen Wiki. They're a small community that's categorizing and standardizing just about every piece of heraldry they can find. A lot of their stuff served as the basis for the designs here, all with a generous creative commons noncommercial license to boot.
Now Onto The Labels
This may be a somewhat nontraditional way to group these, but in all my organizational documents I try and keep the number of categories to a minimum. As in I don't want to have seperate categories for Virginias, VaPers, VaKy, VaKyPer or the myriad English blend types. So it's grouped into Virginia heavy blends, blends with any real Latakia in them, obvious Aromatics, and Burleys kind of serve as a catch all for anything that doesn't fit in Virginias and has a decent amount of Burley. So without further ado...
Virginias
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40 Virginias | Elie and Earlsferry: 40 Virginias clearly gets the Elie and Earlsferry crest because it's four ships. Not really stretching the imagination I know, but it feels fitting with Virginia's ties to historical navies.
Black Virginia | Dunfermline: I think it was the bed of dark earth at the bottom of this lion flanked tower, but there was something that just called to me when matching Black Virginia.
Brown Clunee | Auchterarder: Brown Clunee was originally going to be
Falkland which has a brown deer laying in front of a tree on a hill all in true color. I think the brown deer=brown clunee was what made me go with that. However after smoking the stuff it's punchy, peppery spice made me reevaluate and give it a much feistier falcon crest instead.
Dark Fragrant | Coatbridge: The combination of the unusual dark background and flame spewing top had me quickly associating it with Dark Fragrant's black cav and perique.
Hal O' The Wynd | Jedburgh: This was a really fun one to do. Hal O' The Wynd is named after the blacksmith character in
The Fair Maid of Perth and he's supposedly a great smith and soldier. In my head I imagined him having retired to Perth after serving in the famous Scottish Border Riders, this tin commemorating his youthful days.
Marlin Flake | Stranraer: The first of the Flakes = Ship theme. Marlin Flake seemed appropriate for this one, it's a strong tall classical ship but in an otherwise fairly run of the mill color scheme. Felt fitting to me and my experience with Marlin.
Old Gowrie | Perth: The one that started the whole thing, like I said earlier, this one was easy. Perth is a natural fit and the Agnus Dei lamb really struck a chord with me. Possibly my favorite of all of these.
CellarLabels | Google Drive
Latakias
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3 Noggins | Aberdeen: It's a little silly but seeing 3 Noggins and these castles I couldn't help but think hard noggin = castle and there's three of them!
7 Reserve | Fraserburgh: Another number themed crest. This time it's six flowers and two lines, with one crossed out leaving seven.
Accountant's Mixture | Kilmarnock: For Rattray's "All-Day" Englishes I wanted to go with crests that were a little simpler, something without a lot of frills and would fit with these go to but otherwise fairly straightforward blends.
Black Mallory | Edinburgh: Truth be told I think it was the Black in Black Mallory that had me pairing it with Edinburgh intimidating black castle. Still it's felt right seeing as it's one Scotlands great cities and Mallory is one of Rattray's great blends.
Highland Targe | Dingwall: Highland Targe is one of the blends that kind of hopped around for a while. Obviously I wanted it's crest to be somewhere in the highlands but unsurprisingly there's not a lot of major towns or cities up there. At least few with heraldry that felt appropriate, but Dingwall's fairly unique sun caught my eye especially when I noticed it looked like a small Targe.
Jock's Mixture | Falkirk: Of the "All-Day" blends I've always thought of Jock's as the punchiest, so it got the punchier of the more basic crests. The swords and shields were a bonus.
Professional Mixture | Annan: The last of the "All-Day" Englishes, it again recieves a fairly basic design.
Red Lion | Scotland: A pretty self explanatory one. There really couldn't be any other crest than the Royal Banner of Scotland for Red Lion.
Red Rapparee | Hamilton: Aside from the Red connection I think I picked this one because of the flowers. Maybe it was old memories of the Scarlet Pimpernel but I really gravitated towards this crest for a blend named after 17th century Scottish highwaymen.
CellarLabels | Google Drive
Burleys
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Macbeth | Alyth: Did the real life MacBeth ever live in a castle near Alyth? Well no, but the fictional one did! Plus you can't get much better than the great Scottish king of Shakespearean myth paired with a crowned red lion.
Stirling Flake | Caithness: More Flake=Ship combo, the dark raven seemed fitting for Stirling's strong DFK.
Wallace Flake | Renfrew: This one seemed meant to be, Renfrew is the supposed birthplace of the legendary William Wallace. Plus, it's a ship and a flake!
CellarLabels | Google Drive
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