Our next beer will be called…

Fu Manbrew! Congratulations to Philip M for submitting the winning name! Fu Manbrew won with 42% of the total vote. Handlebar was a close second with 37% of the vote. And apparently only a minority of you guys wanted to order a Walrus at the bar. Thanks to everyone who voted, contributed, and shared. This was a lot of fun. But it’s not quite over! One of the challenges of the Fu Man Brew name is making the graphic look good on our labels. We’ve got three potential options, and we’d love it if you voted on your favorite. Vote in the poll below.

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Now begins the process of ordering tap handles, getting label approval, and trademarking names. It’s a fun process (not really). We’re hoping to get everything buttoned up, including one final test batch, in the next 2 months, so we’ll see how quickly we can launch this new mustachio’d beer!

Thanks to Philip M. for all of his creativity, and thanks to Scoutmob for indulging us in this new experiment in crowdsourcing our beer name. I’m pretty sure we shattered Scoutmob’s record for Facebook comments.

Monday Night recap: “The wit with no name” edition

We brewed our Belgian-style wit last night, complete with fresh-grated ginger. Things went well. That’s all you need to know. But here’s something else you need to know.

We need a name for this wit of ours. It will almost certainly be our 3rd beer, and it still has no name. So here are the parameters:

• Must be centered on an interesting “character” (our beers are always a take on the gentleman in the suit on our logo, see here and here for examples)
• Must be short
• Must not be the name of another beer or energy drink already (we can’t afford any legal fees)
• Witty is good (see what I did there), but not required if the character is interesting enough
• Ginger is an ingredient in the beer but we don’t want to highlight it in the name

So. Any ideas? Leave them as comments. Feel free to add new ones or build on existing. OK GO.

Monday Night recap: “A stout turnout for a stout brew” edition

The story is all too familiar. You’re getting ready to brew a stout when your CEO calls and says he’s not going to make it because he got free court side tickets to the Atlanta Hawks playoff game. It has happened to the best of us, and even Joel and I are not impervious. What do you do in such a situation? You brew that stout anyway. And then the next day you burn your CEO publicly on the internet.

We had a great turnout last night. I think we also might have registered our highest female attendance on record. The word is definitely getting out: Monday night is ladies’ night. The beer was flowing (until we drank it all). The double IPA and the bourbon oak stout were fan favorites. I’ve been thinking about names for the double IPA… right now I like “Blind Pirate.” On the label would be a pirate with double the amount of eye patches as a normal pirate. Thoughts?

We haven’t made a final decision on what type of stout this latest batch will ultimately be. We are leaning towards another bourbon oak since it’s so durn tasty. If you’ve got some other kind of hankering, let us know. [Note: licorice stout WILL NOT be considered.]

In other news, Joel spent some time last night refilling our adjunct grain jars. A thankless task, for which I do not thank him. Thanks to all who came last night, hope you enjoyed yourselves. Fair warning: not brewing over the last few weeks has cut into our beer stock significantly, so there may come a time in the near future when we’ll have to institute a BYOB policy. This does not mean that we don’t love you. It means that we love you too much.

Think about it.

Witless

Naming our Belgian wit has proved trickier than we thought. We got a lot of great response from our last call to arms, but I’m still left feeling, well, witless.

Here’s the issue: Wit’s End appeared to emerge as the crowd favorite, though there were some other great names thrown in the mix. However, I have some trouble connecting the name “Wit’s End” to a strong character, like the Eye Patch = Pirate and the Drafty Kilt = Scotsman. Sure, we could make the stretch to a jester, but if you’ve had our Belgian wit, I think you’ll agree that it deserves a money-maker of a name. (I also mean that literally.)

And not to belabor the point, but I wish the name of the wit could somehow be connected to the style of beer, if only tangentially. We tried to do this with our other names:

• Eye Patch is named after a pirate, and the IPA has its origins on the sea, from the journey from England to India. A stretch? Yes. But we had to get that pirate in there.
• Drafty Kilt is a Scotch Ale, so… Scotland. Kilts. You know.
• Laissez-Faire Barleywine takes forever to age, so you just have to leave it alone and let it do its thing (the laissez-faire principle of economics).

We had some decent traction on this front, specifically with the names

• Weatherman Wit
• Partly Cloudy Wit

What are your thoughts on all of this? Does anything else come to mind? Is Weatherman Wit an awesome enough name? Are we barking up the wrong tree? What if we just call it “Witless” in honor of the naming troubles we’ve had?

Naming our Belgian Wit: Part II

We’re making some progress. The top 2 character choices right now are:

• Weatherman (wits are cloudy)
• Jester (wit… you know)

And the top names are:

• Weatherman Wit
• Scathing Wit
• Wit’s End

Unfortunately my contribution: “Walt’s Wit, Man” failed to make the shortlist. I suspect knavery. Any favorites among these? Or fresh ideas? The issue we’ve run into with this beer is that a lot of the good names (NitWit, Half-Wit) are already taken by obscure brewpubs. Albeit less obscure than us, in that they have “revenues” and “beer available for purchase.”

Name our Belgian wit

Okay everybody. You obviously enjoy naming beers. Good thing, because we’re in another pickle… Our Weissguy Hefeweizen started out as a pretty traditional Bavarian-style wheat beer, complete with the ubiquitous orange peel and coriander. But after drinking more of the the wheat beers and determining where this beer fits into our lineup, we decided to migrate it to a Belgian wit. We were way more successful than I thought we would be, and this is now one of my favorites of the beers we brew.

Herein lies the trouble. We can’t use the 1930s gangster name because “weiss” is too German. We need something more “witty” (a wit pun ? ZING!). And before we start thinking of a name, we need a good character to base it around. Here’s a list of the characters we’re using for other beers:

• Pirate
• Ninja
• Bagpiper
• Monk
• Base Jumper

We need something that either connotes the medieval origins of the beer (maybe a knight?) or the beer’s name (clown = wit, or maybe that’s a stretch). So before we name it, we need a character to guide our thinking. I should also add that we’re experimenting with adding ginger to this beer, though that hasn’t been finalized yet.

Suggestions?

Eye Patch Ale… coming soon

You guys responded in spades when we asked for a new pirate name for our Swashchuckler IPA. Frankly, Jeff didn’t think you were smart enough to come up with any good ideas. One idea quickly rose above the rest:

Eye Patch Ale

A subtle nod to the IPA (Eye… P… A.), the Eye Patch was coined by Seth over at Mostly Muppet, an esteemed reader who, sadly, hasn’t even tried our IPA. Seth has verbally agreed not to sue our pants off for using his handiwork. We are furiously working on a new label. (The Olympics have gotten in the way.)

AAAAAARGH!