Where the Little Gnomes Come From?

If you’ve ever had a bottle of La Chouffe, you’ll probably recognise the little red hatted gnome on the front. Turns out his name is Marcel, and he’s been hanging around the Belgian village of Achouffe pretty much since the brewery began.

The brewery itself started as a bit of a hobby in the early 1980s, and somewhere along the way Marcel became part of it. What could have just been another beer logo ended up becoming this whole little world of gnomes, which is where these bottle caps come in.

There are loads of them. Different colours, different illustrations and Marcel seemingly doing something completely different every time. He’s fishing, cycling, drinking beer, cooking, sitting around a fire with his mates, wandering about with a backpack. Basically, whatever beer you pick up, there’s a decent chance this little bloke is off doing something.

A lot of the colours and characters tie into the different Chouffe beers too. La Chouffe, Mc Chouffe, Chouffe IPA, Cherry Chouffe and the rest all have their own look and personality. Put enough of the caps together and it starts looking less like packaging and more like someone documenting the increasingly strange life of a Belgian gnome.

And that’s probably why I like them so much. They could have stuck the exact same logo on every bottle and nobody would have cared. Instead they used this tiny bit of metal that’s normally ripped off and thrown in the bin to make something people actually want to collect.