Naming Your Brew

Luckily my brew partner and I are both pretty illustrious when it comes to making names for our beer. We have the name game down to a science.

My advice is to stay away from puns or anything popular really. A nice starting point is to find literature with some nice words in succession, get the brain juices flowing a bit. Short stories or poems often have some beautiful sayings. You just gotta find em.

 

I usually have an idea or concept that inspires me to create the beer and come up with the name based off of that. I also find the name I originally intend to use will sometimes change after I actually finish the beer based on taste, aroma, appearance. I don't necessarily care if the name is used by a brewery already but I'm not blatantly going to name my IPA Heady Topper or any other well known name.

I tried to make a dank and juicy APA and was using the working name Strawberry Kush, it was going to highlight the strawberry flavors of Belma hops. When the beer was finished it had some nice grass notes in the finish and went with the name Strawberry Fields.

The beers name themselves, have fun with it and just do what you enjoy.

 

my saison had a very strong aroma of bananas
so i called it "Monkey Season Saison"
an original name that was very fitting
it was very well received.

That, and i like monkeys

 

Absolutely hate naming beers. They usually get a yeast and a hop, sometimes a malt. Or some combo.
So people have difficulty with C20 3724 Liberty for example.

But fuck em. I make my beer for me. If I absolutely have to name a beer, for a festival or something, than it will frequently get a Motorhead name. You know, stupid stuff.
"Dancing On Your Grave"
"Over The Top"
"Killed By Death"
Even then, chances are I'm not making the exact same beer twice. So fuck it. The name isn't so important anyway. Who am I supposed to impress with the name anyhow?

Cheers.

 

I use song names for mine. I have about 4 genres I pull from. Sometimes the name has a story to the beer, sometimes not and just sounds good.

 

I name all of my beers, but I'm kind of all over the place with my thought process. When I looked at a list of my beer names the only ones that seemed to have a 'theme' were the ones with some alliterative qualities, i.e. Papa's Porter, Ho Ho Hooch, Rad Dad Cream Ale and Kaiser's Kolsch. Really not very exciting. (Maybe I should have used Killer Kolsch.)

 

I ripped off Anchor's Brotherhood Steam and called it GMFBrotherhood Steam. That's the only one I've named.

 

When naming my beer, I've ended up overlapping my love of beer with my love of philosophy and psychology, but for fear of becoming too nerdy I try to throw in a pun. I have a brett saison called "ExistentAle," a sour blonde ale names "Tartre de Sartre," a sour ale made with 40+ built up dregs names "Hostoricity." I plan on moving to psychoanalysts next...

Although, before I was satisfied with my end products, I never named them. I only used descriptors like "Lemongrass IPA." Now that I actually enjoy the beers I brew, they are like my children - they deserve names. haha

 

I admire you guys and your creative names (and labels), I just can't be bothered. Also, I never brew the same beer, so names are kind of pointless for me.

So I end up with things like Saison #1, Saison #2,... Saison #2 w/Brett, ACC pale ale (amarillo, cascade, centennial) and so on.

 

I do something similar. I name mine by Style-Date-Descriptor. This helps when searching for recipes in the software I use. The only ones that get names are when I have friends who want to enter them into untapped and I usually let them choose.

 

I name all my beers, they tend to have sci-fi/nerd themed names. One of my co-brewers makes labels for most of them.

https://untappd.com/420brewing/beer

 

I named my "brewery" Bedtime Beer Co., because a lot of my brewing activities are done while my 2 YO is sleeping. I've tried to keep more or less with that theme

Night Light - Kolsch
N-A-P Pale Ale - A play on having to spell things out so kids don't know what you're talking about
All-Nighter - Coffee stout
Good Night - IPA
Good Good Night - DIPA
First Light - Hefe
Time of the Season - Saison (also a song reference I guess, haha)

I'm thinking I'll use the name for the type of beer then number them moving forward, i.e., Good Night #2.

 

In the latest issue of BYO Magazine, you can see that I won Readers' Choice for the label contest. Didn't come up with a clever name, just called it a Session IPA and focused on the art itself. Although it won, I thought the other 10 labels I submitted were better, but I'll take it!

 

Mickeys Monkey, Munich Dunkel.
Broons Bane, English Brown Porter.
Crimson Tide, Amber Bock.
Vlad's Imperial Baltic Porter.
Some Girls Creme Ale.
FrankenStout, Irish sweet Stout.

 

Monkey Dunkel

 

Yeah, I'm fairly similar. I normally have a canonical identifier for any given batch, but it tends to be basically a description based on style or what the beer was inspired by - "hoppy saison", "Dead Pony-ish", "1848 Porter", "Huell Patersbier" or whatever.

The best idea that I've heard for a naming scheme was to use ship names from Iain M Banks' Culture series:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=4456.0

 

Any IRS brew is a king, Hawiian ,yellow, dark, etc.

Currently I had a whole hop line ,all were WH the 1,2 etc.

Then fun stiudd like where's my ass Molly, a pun on mole beer.

Message Recieved, a ipa for a pal who is a short wave radio enthusiast, smoky blue borris, a smoked blueberry strong ale,,,,,

And it goes on and on. Wherever your mind wants to go works for your home brewery.

Have fun.

 

Ive named every beer Ive done.
I dont really care or check if its been used. And even to that, How would know if it had? My city of 500,000 has roughly 45 breweries. Thats relying on google to give you an answer.

Strata The Kveiking
Pearle Neckless smash
Chancho big red ipa
Teddy Hopper (clone)
Chocolate RainDear Baltic porter
Owl Capone IPA
Carlo belgian saison
Escalator (clone of elevated)
pepper baja kid mexican lager

If I get a cease and desist letter from a brewery that I used their name, Ill have to dispose of the evidence in a hurry

 

Small breweries use names that other breweries have used all the time. As long as the beers are served in house and not bottled/distributed (both the original and the copycat), nobody seems to care.