Beer names, the hardest part of making beer
It’s always exciting and fun to come up with a new recipe or a twist on a flagship beer. Brown Iron Brewery has the luxury of having a smaller brewing system, 7 barrels, so we can have a bit more freedom to experiment.
Craft Beer at Brown Iron Brewhouse
We are often inspired by other breweries, reading books about flavor profiles (we love the book The Flavor Bible), trends in food and cultures and just walking down the grocery aisles or local markets. Some of our favorite spots for inspiration are the fruit section, breakfast and candy aisles as well as the unique Oreo section!
The recipe development is often the fun part! We can spend hours tasting and mixing flavors. We choose “real” ingredients over extracts or flavorings. It’s not uncommon to spend a few hours unwrapping Reese’s peanut butter cups, making gallons of cold brew coffee or cooking down strawberries to add to the fermenters.
You would think the hard part is making the beer. Of course there is the recipe development, the brewing, the cleaning and the constant monitoring to make a great beer but then comes the name.
How do we name our beer? As we taste it throughout the entire process, flavor notes will appear or become more pronounced. Sometimes names of beer come from exactly what it tastes like such as our Cinnamon French Toast, Chocolate Cherry Cordial or Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie. Others take their names from a twist on something we have heard before like Strawberry Zeals Forever, Hot Tub Beer Machine or He’s Bad Bad Pecan Brown. Pop culture also plays into beer naming such as the Kramer line from Seinfeld, “The Mackinac Peaches, Jerry” or the phrase Boi was added to our beer called Hop Boi. Then there is “Do You know the Muffin Man?”. There are names that feel good rolling off your tongue such as Mongo Like Mango and Freaki Tiki. Tim likes to name beers with a deeper, more sophisticated way using legends and folklore such as Helheim Hammer. In Norse mythology Helheim literally means “House of Hell” which is fitting for our high ABV beer or Haka Happiness. Haka is a ceremonial dance in the Maori culture.
Naming beers isn’t as easy as it may seem. Usually there are a lot of comments from the staff like “ewww no way” or “that’s a hard pass” or “we love it!”. Poor Tim wanted to name a beer “Citrasaurus” and we banned him from using dinosaur names lol. Later the name started to be a common joke but it grew on us and we were going to use it but someone else took it!
Once we decide upon a name, we have to research the internet to see if the name has been “taken” or trademarked. We always search Untappd first. We want to be the only ones using the name.
Are you creative and want to come up with a name? Do you have “thick skin” if we reject it? Send me your thoughts if you have any to patti@BrownIron.com and HAPPY NAMING!