Beer Is The Path To The Dark Side.

Is it really 5 years since I last blogged? Time certainly gets away. Last week makes 41 years since the first Star Wars film was released, and it definitely doesn't seem that long to me. When it was new I think we saw it at the cinema 9 times. In those days cinemas would buy a print of their biggest earners and run them for literally years on end. Crocodile Dundee screened for so long at our local independent, they had a gigantic painting of Hogan and Kozlowski applied to the side of their building. Rings a bell its season ran for 3 years. When Star Wars came out I was only 3 years old, so seeing it regularly with my sisters possibly counted as big-screen child-minding as much as it attested fandom. Now, of course, Star Wars is a Disney juggernaut, pumping out new films just about every year for better or worse. (For mine, most assuredly worse in the case of a fully CG, horrifyingly Uncanny Valley Peter Cushing - and I'd hoped Blood Beast Terror would be the greatest indignity to befall him.) But the nostalgia lives on - and I still have considerable affection for those first couple of films. (It started to fade a little when the Ewoks showed up.) For the last few years I've been making beer labels for an old friend who runs a bar called The Catfish, in Fitzroy. Special short-runs of beer have been produced to mark each of the fine establishment's birthdays, with illustrations for every brew helping to mark the occasion. The bewhiskered fish itself always makes an appearance in the artworks, thrown into whichever situation the particular style of beer demands. For the most recent anniversary, The Catfish worked with Cavalier Brewing to produce an Imperial Pilsner. And what self-respecting publican Star Wars fan could resist having a beer with a name like that do anything but go to The Dark Side? So it came to pass that a Catfish Emperor ruled over an effervescent amber galaxy - not so long ago, in a bar not far away.

Give in. Let it flow through you. USE THE SAUCE, LUKE!

This was a really fun picture to make.

The Cavalier Catfish Imperial Pilsner strikes back.