From the Great Northern Brewery at Khyber Pass to Lion.

Lion Red is a beer brand of Lion, the brewer owned by Japan’s Kirin Holdings. The brand’s own website says Lion Red “began life as the Pale Ale from the Great Northern Brewery in 1907,” and English Wikipedia notes that the 1907 date is printed on its cans and bottles.

The lion itself is older than the beer. Lion’s corporate history says the pioneer brewer Richard Seccombe founded the Great Northern Brewery at Khyber Pass, Auckland, in 1861, and used the lion from his family crest as its logo. In 1914, the company says, the Great Northern Brewery became officially known as the Lion Brewery when it merged with Campbell & Ehrenfried, a business formed in 1898 from the merger of Auckland’s Albert and Hobson Bridge breweries; the Ehrenfried brothers had bought the Albert Brewery in 1878.

A century of mergers followed. Lion says the Lion Brewery was one of ten brewing companies that amalgamated to form New Zealand Breweries in 1923. The northern division of New Zealand Breweries took the name Lion Breweries in 1977, and the rest of the company followed in 1997. In 1988 Lion Breweries merged with the retailer LD Nathan & Co to form Lion Nathan, under Douglas Myers, who had become chief executive of Campbell & Ehrenfried in 1965, according to the company’s timeline. By then the two businesses were already linked: in 1981, Lion says, Campbell & Ehrenfried bought a 20 per cent share in Lion Breweries.

Kirin arrived in stages. Lion says Myers sold most of his shareholding in Lion Nathan to Kirin Brewery Company in 1998, after which Kirin built a 45 per cent interest; in 2009 Kirin Holdings took 100 per cent ownership of Lion Nathan, which it merged with National Foods. The business has traded simply as Lion since 2011, the company says.

A beer renamed by the people who drank it.

The name Lion Red began with drinkers rather than with a marketing department. Lion says New Zealanders started calling the beer “Lion Red” because of its red label and can, and that in the mid-1980s it officially changed the name from Lion Beer to Lion Red. English Wikipedia gives the same account.

The red still leads the brand’s presentation. Its website today opens with the line “Stay true to whero” — whero is the te reo Māori word for red — and uses the tagline “Celebrate great times with good mates.” The site describes Lion Red as a pale ale and calls it “our quintessential Kiwi beer”; English Wikipedia lists it as a 4.0 per cent ale. The company lists 440 mL cans, 330 mL cans and bottles, a 745 mL bottle it calls the “Quartz,” and draught at selected bars.

Lion Red’s advertising has been made by some of the country’s larger agencies. The national museum, Te Papa, holds a Lion Red advertising poster in its history collection, credited to Saatchi & Saatchi and Lion Breweries. Campaign Asia reported that Lion Nathan had appointed DDB New Zealand to handle all advertising for the brand.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all New Zealand beers: Speight’s, Steinlager, Monteith’s, Tui, Lion Red, Panhead and Emerson’s. Most of them belong to one of two brewing groups. Lion, owned by Japan’s Kirin since it bought Lion Nathan in 2009, owns Speight’s, Steinlager and Lion Red, all of which trace back to the old New Zealand Breweries, as well as two younger names it bought: Emerson’s, the Dunedin brewery it took over in November 2012, and Panhead, the Upper Hutt brewery it agreed to buy in May 2016. DB Breweries, founded in 1930 and part of Heineken since Heineken bought out Asia Pacific Breweries in 2012, owns Tui and Monteith’s.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by the liquid than by a name, a label, a can and years of advertising, and the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its brewing or grown far beyond the town it started in. Some of these names are more than a century old — Speight’s was founded in Dunedin in 1876 — while others are recent: the Monteith’s name has been used for the Greymouth brewery only since 1990, and Steinlager took its name in 1962, four years after it was launched as Steinecker. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beer is actually brewed today.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is made and how its labels and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Rugby league, regional rugby and a red can.

The brand is closely tied to sport. English Wikipedia says Lion Red has long sponsored the New Zealand Rugby League, and that the brand sponsored the Auckland-based Warriors from their entry into the Australian competition in 1995 until 2014. The domestic Lion Red Cup, a national rugby league competition backed by Lion Nathan, ran from 1994 to 1996 before it was replaced by the Bartercard Cup, according to English Wikipedia, citing the New Zealand Rugby League’s 1998 annual, which describes a successful first season but losses in all three years before the league scrapped it. English Wikipedia also lists Lion Red as sponsor of Auckland Rugby League’s Fox Memorial premier competition and of the Northland and Counties Manukau provincial rugby union teams.

The brewery behind it has moved. Lion says it opened The Pride, a larger multi-beverage brewery in South Auckland, in 2010, and closed the Khyber Pass Brewery where the Great Northern story began; English Wikipedia says Lion Red is brewed in Auckland. The same timeline dates Steinlager to 1958, when it was launched as Steinecker, and records the opening of Speight’s Brewery in Dunedin in 1876.

The name needs a little care online. Lion Red is not connected with pubs called the Red Lion, and Lion, the brewer, is a different business from the many companies that use the word in their names; the brand’s own site is lionred.co.nz.

For a design guide, Lion Red shows how a colour on a can can become a brand name, and how a nineteenth-century crest can survive more than a century of mergers. Compare Steinlager, Lion’s green-labelled lager, and Speight’s, its Dunedin stablemate. For this guide we use label red, deep red and bar black with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Lion Red’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.