The Many, an independent Los-Angeles based ad agency that specializes in participatory marketing, has launched Ceremony Botanical Brewing. The company’s approach is to build every brew around a single botanical rather than by adding ingredients to an existing recipe.
“We’ve created a brand-new craft-beer category, where the botanical is the product and the beer is the vessel,” said Jens Stoelken, a co-founder of The Many and a 20-year industry veteran across spirits, beer, energy drinks and non-alcoholic beverages. The endeavor is the result of the complementary business experiences of The Many’s co-founders. In addition to Stoelken, the identity, packaging and brand universe is created by agency co-founder Blake Marquis, who also serves a Ceremony’s brand manager.
“Ceremony is not a flavored beer,” says Stoelken. “It is not a beer brand. It is something that does not yet have a category name, and that gap is the point. Mass beer has been losing younger drinkers not because that demographic stopped wanting to gather around something but because mass beer stopped giving them a reason to. Gen Z, the most participatory generation in the culture, gravitates toward brands with stories, ingredients with histories and experiences that mean something. Ceremony is built from that observation.”
Stoelken, who grew up in Germany, developed the concept in 2024 after tasting a matcha beer at Kyoto Brewing Company while traveling in Japan. Each brew, he explains, starts with a botanical chosen for its centuries-long history as a catalyst for community building: matcha from the Japanese tea ceremony, hibiscus from the communal drinking traditions of Mexico, West Africa, and Egypt, and mate from the South American ritual of passing the gourd.
The brand architecture seeks authenticity across touchpoints. “The brand identity announces a beer brand immediately distinct from conventional craft beer (a struggling category) and functional wellness beverages (a growing one),” Marquis said. “The design communicates that this is not some flavor-extension brand or a novelty botanical gimmick. It says that Ceremony is an intentional drinking experience rooted in ritual, ingredient reverence and cultural meaning. Ceremony’s goal, the co-founders say, is to own the space where social, functional and cultural drinking overlap and engage with consumers who are health-conscious, socially engaged and culturally curious.
The wordmark plays a major role in signaling the brand positioning, with an elegant, almost literary quality that feels elevated, timeless and intentional. It does not read as rugged, industrial or contemporary in an overplayed tech-wellness pitch. Ceremony is balancing several tensions: old and new, cultural and modern, beer and botanical, social and intentional.
The design system leverages white space liberally. Color is used to create mood and differentiate ritual experience by botanical and typography is meant to contribute to the ritual feeling. The colors reinforce the strategic tension of the brand packaging: elevated and design-forward but clearly functional.
Graphics of the botanical ingredients are rendered in a tactile, hand-drawn, colored-pencil style, with visible texture, subtle imperfection and a sense of close observation. This communicates care, humanity and faithfulness to the ingredients, a throwback to the traditional fine-artist’s notebook. Packaging design is based on a single ingredient centered as the focal point and given scale, space and visual priority. Illustrations are built around a single hero botanical shown at scale. The product story begins with the botanical, not the beer style.
Ceremony was launched at a free social event at Hi Sign Brewing in East Austin, a veteran-owned craft brewery and taproom. Two inaugural releases of the brand line-up ― the Matcha Botanical Pilsner and the Hibiscus Botanical Ale Ceremony ― are available to the public at Hi Sign.
