Kallu & Apong

Packaging identity for two traditional drinks

Category: Branding · packaging · visual identity
Drinks: Kallu (Kerala) · Po:ro Apong (Assam)
Role: Identity, label, illustration

Two drinks that already have a culture, and almost no shelf. Kallu is palm wine from Kerala; Po:ro Apong is rice beer of the Mishing tribe. Both are still poured from unmarked bottles. The work was to give each a visual language that locals would recognise, and that a stranger could remember.

Branding, packaging & illustration

A label for what was never labelled

Packaging
Visual identity
Illustration

Kallu
Palm wine, Cocos nucifera Kuttanad, Alleppey, Kerala
Apong
Rice beer, Po:ro Mishing tribe, Assam & Arunachal
Format
650 ml bottle labels Identity, story posters, mockups

Visual identity board pairing Kallu and Apong circular marks with still-life photographs — Visual identity: circular marks, alcohol as a small diagram, and the drinks as they are actually served.

The brief

Popular at home, invisible on a shelf

Kallu is one of Kerala’s most familiar drinks, tapped from the coconut inflorescence, fermented in clay, sold under wooden signboards that simply say കള്ള് / TODDY. Apong is cooked, smoked and filtered over months, then often sold in unlabelled plastic. The brief was not to invent a drink. It was to brand two that already had a public, and almost no face.

Need for branding

Both drinks are unique, widely consumed, and culturally loaded: Theyyam, hospitality, toddy shops in the green. Without a label they stay local gossip. With one, they can be a memorable first pour.

Identity
Packaging
Place

KALLU
White, milky, 8.1%. A golden-hour palette from Alleppey backwaters: paddy, coconut line, red sun, set against mustard so the frosted bottle can hold its own.
APONG
Dark, herbal, 18–25%. Donyi Polo, the sun and moon, and the geometry of Mishing weave. Black, crimson, peach and white, like textile pulled onto glass.

Kallu

Golden hour, cut through with black

The liquid is off-white to milky. A quiet label would disappear. The colour language is the hour after the ferry light: peach, rust, olive-gold, coral, with Futura, slightly modified, for the English wordmark. The landscape on the wrap is Kuttanad as anyone who has been there already knows it: palms, water, a red disc of sun.

Kallu visual language: Futura specimen, Alleppey reference photograph, and a golden-hour colour bar — Visual language: type, backwater reference, and the palette built to contrast a milky pour.

Final Kallu lockup and wraparound bottle label with Malayalam and English wordmarks over a sunset landscape — Final design and label. കള്ളു over TODDY, sliced through the letters, reflected in the water.

Repeating pattern of white Kallu bottles on a mustard-yellow ground — Frosted white glass on mustard. The bottle as pattern, not just a prop.

Apong

Sun, moon, and the weave

Donyi is the sun, Polo the moon. The mark is a tan burst over a crescent, grain stalks underneath, PO:RO and APONG held in red bars. Colour comes from Mishing textile: black field, crimson type, peach metal, a thin white rule, so the bottle reads as cloth before it reads as beer.

Apong visual language on terracotta: Donyi Polo notes, Mishing textile, colour triangles, Clarendon and Century Gothic — Visual language: Donyi Polo, the weave, Clarendon BT with Century Gothic, black / crimson / peach / white.

Final Po:ro Apong lockup and three-panel bottle label with nutrition facts — Final design and label. A three-panel wrap: story, mark, and the facts a shop can actually print.

Three amber Po:ro Apong bottles on wood, black labels with gold mark and red Rice Beer type — Amber glass, black label, gold mark. Rice beer that no longer looks borrowed from a jerry can.