Jesse Crock, Eddyline and the Story Behind Epic Day IPA
Some artwork becomes part of a brand. Some artwork becomes part of a place. And every once in a while, a particular piece of art becomes part of your own story, too.
For me, that’s the Epic Day.
I saw the artwork that would become the Epic Day Double IPA on the very first day I rolled into Buena Vista, long before I ever imagined I would become the artist behind Eddyline’s cans. More than a decade later, I see that same artwork very differently. I see a piece of Eddyline’s history. I see the work of the artist who came before me. And I see a question that has become an important part of my own work:
How do you take something that already has a history and make it your own without losing what made it special in the first place?
It was early June 2014. I had just driven from Georgia to Colorado, experienced the Rocky Mountains for the very first time, and was starving. I also really wanted a beer—it had been a hell of a drive.
I sat underneath that giant mural at the Eddyline Taproom, ate a pizza, drank my first Eddyline beer (a half pour of River Runners Pale, because I was at altitude for the first time…and it still kicked my butt), and met my first friend in town.
As a relatively young artist—and a very new adventurer—I remember thinking it was SO COOL to see acrylic paintings of adventure artwork covering the walls of a craft brewery.
At that point, I was new to riversports. I basically landed in BV because of kayaking. The mural featured Mount Princeton in the background, a woman climbing a big overhang, a kayaker bracing through a rapid, and a mountain biker shredding nearby.
I had no idea how much that place—or that artwork—would eventually shape my life.
Over the next decade, I would eventually pick up all of those sports myself. That's one of the funny things about mountain culture.
It rubs off on you.
Today, I'm the artist behind Eddyline's complete rebrand. But before I ever started thinking about printing processes, color separations, packaging and how to translate artwork onto aluminum, there was a mural on the wall of the taproom.
That big mural became the can art for a BIG BEER: the Epic Day Double IPA.
For me, that makes the Epic Day more than just another beer can design. It's a little piece of Eddyline's artistic history—and a pretty perfect example of how art can evolve without losing where it came from.
To understand that, you have to go back to the artist who started it all.
His name is Jesse Crock.
Before I came to Eddyline, there was Jesse
I sat down with Jesse a few weeks ago to talk about the mural and learn more about his history as an artist—and with Eddyline.
Jesse's relationship with Eddyline started back when South Main was still taking shape and there were empty buildings waiting to become something. He was invited to show his artwork in one of those spaces.
“At the time I was finishing up my grad work through Adams State College, and my grad work was all these large-format paintings of climbers, mountain bikers, kayakers — all the stuff that I love to do, and that I thought everybody loved to do. And they were really large, brightly colored, slightly abstracted.”
That show caught the attention of Mic and Molley, the original owners of Eddyline. Jesse started hanging his artwork at the South Main location (the original brewery, now restaurant), and eventually the relationship grew into something much bigger.
As Jesse described it:
“It just seemed to find this natural progression where I started hanging my work all the time with you guys, and that's kind of what blossomed into the beer designs.”
The first beers to feature his artwork included Red Chili Porter, Raspberry Wheat and Pumpkin Patch Pale Ale.
And I love the way those early cans came to be. The paintings existed first—part of a series featuring the same mountain landscape, with the adventures and colors changing with the seasons. Then they became beer cans.
For me, with a fine art background, that was wildly cool.
I've always been drawn to mixed media and the idea that there are no real limits to the materials you can combine to create depth and dimension. That same idea eventually carried into my digital work. Instead of physically layering paint, paper and other materials, I could build artwork layer by layer in Photoshop and Illustrator.
My process has evolved from Jesse's. I don't start on canvas and move my artwork into a digital program. I draw directly in Adobe, creating vector artwork from the beginning.
But the way I think about making art hasn't changed much.
Jesse painted with acrylic. I draw with a stylus on a Wacom tablet. He's working with paint, brushes and a physical canvas. I'm working with software and a digital canvas.
We're using different tools, but we're both starting in the same place: color, scenery, movement and adventure.
Color was one of the first things that connected Jesse's artwork to Eddyline. Brian England, Eddyline's CEO, remembers being drawn to his work immediately:
“The thing that caught our eye from day one was the colors, the vibrancy. It was just absolutely, absolutely incredible.”
Jesse has always been drawn to high contrast and strong color, often pulling the bright colors of boats, bikes and outdoor gear into his landscapes and adventure paintings.
That connection to color is something I recognize in my own work, too. One of my favorite classes in school was color theory, and I've always felt like seeing all those different shades and combinations was one of my superpowers.
Jesse never shies away from making a landscape vibrant—and neither do I.
So, what exactly is an Epic Day?
That brings us back to the mural.
I had been sitting underneath it since the day I arrived in Buena Vista. But when I talked to Jesse about it, I finally got to hear the story behind the painting from the person who created it.
The Eddyline South Main location was already open, and the brewery was preparing to move to the new taproom location off the highway. Mic and Molley had an idea for a mural that captured what an incredible day in the valley could look like.
Jesse described the concept as “bringing together all the things that you love to do here in the valley.”
The scene was built around Mount Princeton and combined all those pieces of mountain culture—boating, mountain biking, climbing and the landscape itself.
Jesse had done some of those things, but not all of them in one day.
“I've never done all three at once. I've boated and I've mountain biked all on the same day, but I've never done all three.”
But that wasn't really the point.
The point was to imagine the kind of day where you try to do everything. The kind of day where you wake up and think, How much adventure can I possibly fit into today?
For me, an Epic Day has evolved with me over the years.
It started with white-knuckling my first run through the Numbers and my first overnight rafting trip down Gunnison Gorge, then became climbing at Shelf Road before heading to my serving job with chalk still on my hands. Later, it meant trading off river surf sessions with my partner while our newborn napped on the shore. These days, it might be a morning in the crags around Independence Pass followed by a jump into the icy waters of the Devil's Punchbowl.
The activities have changed, but the idea hasn't: an Epic Day is about squeezing as much adventure as you can out of the day you've been given.
And that's exactly what Jesse was trying to capture on the wall.
He painted fast.
The mural is roughly 20 by 12 feet, and Jesse finished it in about two and a half days.
“I cranked out this mural. I slept on the floor right here, because [the taproom] wasn't open yet—they were still building the tables, and the metalwork guy had just finished up. So I had a little sleeping bag, and I just slept on the floor and just worked my little heart out.”
The process was just as much an experiment as the finished piece. Jesse played with the abstract qualities of his work—letting pieces of the mountain come through the climber, incorporating waves and drips of paint, and using the tires to create movement.
That's what I see when I look at the mural now.
Not just a collection of outdoor sports or a picture of Mount Princeton, but movement, color and energy layered together into one giant celebration of adventure.
It's not really showing you an Epic Day. It's making you feel one.
When the mural became a beer
Eventually, that mural made its way onto a can.
Epic Day came out of a brewers' project around 2014–2015. The brewers wanted to make a beer they wanted to drink, and Eddyline was looking for another beer to add to the lineup—something big and bold, worthy of being the beer you reach for when you've finished an epic day. You spend the day doing ALL the things. Then you get to the end of it, and you want that ONE beer.
The mural was already hanging in the taproom, so the answer seemed pretty obvious. Why create another piece of artwork when the perfect one was already right there?
The original process was wonderfully straightforward: take a high-resolution photograph of Jesse's mural and figure out how to put it on a can. Ball Corporation digitized the painting and turned it into the original Epic Day can artwork, along with a carbon fiber flare to fill in the rest of the space.
The artwork that had been created to live on the wall could suddenly travel with people, and that, to me, is one of the coolest things about the history of Eddyline's artwork.
It has never really been about keeping art in one place. It's about taking it with you. It's part of the adventure.
Then I became the artist
By the time I eventually took on Eddyline's artwork, I had spent years figuring out how to combine my own love of art and adventure.
After moving to Buena Vista, I started a T-shirt company where I created hand-drawn designs inspired by Colorado's outdoor adventures. I sold those designs all around Colorado at whitewater festivals, to raft companies, and river outfitters.
So when the opportunity eventually came to become the designer behind Eddyline, it made sense.
I came into the role as an artist, not as someone with years of experience in printing, packaging and branding. I had to learn how artwork actually gets onto aluminum, from printing processes and color separations to all the tiny details between an idea on a screen and a finished can in your hand.
And then I took on something much bigger than designing one beer. I took on the complete Eddyline can lineup rebrand.
By that point, I had designed a handful of Eddyline's seasonal beers. The idea of taking on the entire lineup was both exhilarating and nerve-wracking.
How do I take these OG core beers, with Jesse's artistic backbone, and make them my own without losing what people loved about them?
I wasn't starting with a blank canvas. I was stepping into a visual history that already belonged to Eddyline—and to the people who had been drinking these beers for years.
The more I looked at Jesse's artwork, the more I realized I didn't need to copy his style. I needed to understand what made it feel like Eddyline in the first place: bright color and high contrast, Colorado landscapes, movement and adventure, and the sense that the outdoors isn't something separate from everyday life here.
It's just what you do. And those were things I already cared about.
So the rebrand wasn't about replacing Jesse's artistic voice with mine. It was about taking the pieces that had become part of Eddyline's visual language and translating them through my own.
Art doesn't have to stay in one place
There's another part of Jesse's story that I keep coming back to.
He's still an elementary art teacher, and he talked about how important it is for his students to see that you can make art professionally and put your work out into the world for other people to enjoy.
“One of the things I feel very proud of is that the kids at my school know me as a professional artist as well. And so I think it's really important — I always have a painting set up in the back corner, and the kids will see it change from day to day. I'll paint after school, and then they get to see that progression. And I think it's really important that you can take your art out into the world, and that you can do this professionally.”
I love that.
Because in a funny way, that's exactly what happened with Eddyline's artwork—just on a much longer timeline.
Jesse's paintings became can designs. One of those paintings became a mural, and that mural became the Epic Day. And eventually, another artist came along and started adding her own layer to the story.
The artwork keeps changing, but it never really stops moving forward.
The medium changes. The technology changes. The artist changes. But the creative process continues.
The next version of the story
That's what makes the Epic Day so meaningful to me now.
When I first sat underneath that mural in 2014, I didn't know who Jesse was. I didn't know the painting would become one of Eddyline's iconic beers. I certainly didn't know that, years later, I'd become the artist responsible for reimagining Eddyline's cans.
And I didn't know that more than a decade later, I'd sit down with the person who painted it, talking about what that piece of art meant to him while reflecting on my own journey—from artist to graphic designer to someone who fell in love with branding.
Maybe that's what I appreciate most about the Epic Day.
Creative work doesn't have to stay frozen in the moment it was created. It can grow. It can change hands. It can move from a paintbrush to a digital pen, from a wall to a can, from one artist to another—and still carry the same feeling.
Because at its heart, the Epic Day was never really about the artwork.
It was about the day the artwork was trying to capture: the river, the mountains, the bike ride, the climb, the paddle, the people you meet along the way.
It's that twinkle in your eye when you decide to squeeze just one more adventure into the day—and eventually, sitting down with a cold beer and reliving it with your favorite people by your side.
Jesse painted his version of that feeling more than a decade ago. I've had the opportunity to create my own version of Eddyline ever since.
Maybe that's what being an artist is: taking what came before you, adding something of yourself, and leaving it a little different for whoever comes next.
The can may change. The artwork may change. The artist may change.
But the feeling stays—and there's always another epic day waiting for you outside.
