By Dick Cantwell

The Nine Billion Names of Beer

One day we brewers will wake up, recipes in mind, brewsheets having assiduously been filled out the night before, ripe for the creation of a new beer. We'll go in to work and mash in, then go about the business of brewing -- sparging and running off, boiling, hopping, pitching yeast and knocking out. And then we'll clean up and prepare to enjoy the fruits of our labors, whether from the sample valve of a particularly prized batch, in our own brewpub, or from the tap of some convivial and nearby tavern. Someone will come up and ask us what we brewed today. A brown ale, a stout, a pale ale, pilsner, porter, bock or wheat beer we'll say in variegated chorus. Cool, they'll say, what are you going to call it? Oh, we'll say, yeah, I've been thinking about that. I'm going to call it...uh...wait a second here...I had a couple of ideas...sure, it's...

But it won't come. The ideas will have taken flight. We'll sit there and stammer, to no avail. For in fact, at that moment, there will be no names left. They will all have been taken. There will remain no local landmark or personage, no animal or geologic eminence left un-namesaked. There won't even be numbers to fall back on, each 33, 45 and 500 having already been used. And then, as we sit horrified, our interlocutors sitting indulgently by, we'll look up to the heavens in appeal, and one by one, as we watch, the stars will begin to go out.

That can't happen, a friend of mine has said when I've voiced my concern about the proliferation, the squandering of names. No matter how backed into a corner you might seem, there's always another. And for this eventuality he has reserved Richard M. Nixon Pale Ale.

Names are an important part of our industry, both on the grand scale of the nation's largest brewers and on the more manageable level of our micro-segment. The former has traditionally relied on family names and European place names; the latter on wildlife, whimsy and winking local reference. There is little doubt that many products would not have survived but for the fortuitous selection of a name that captured fancy, inspired laughter, or simply made people want to say it. Others have certainly numbered their days by an unlucky choice.

Brewers protect and fight for their names, as do those with a vested interest in any other industry. An unnamed brewer and patriot with contract operations in Oregon and Pennsylvania not long ago brought suit against a substantially smaller brewer over the use of a geographic place name in the name of his brewery -- never mind that this upstart little guy happened to be located there. San Francisco's Anchor Brewing, to whom we all owe a daily genuflection, maintains a corps of new age hard guys periodically dispatched to protect its exclusive use of the word "steam." Witness also the "Blue Heron wars" of a couple of years ago, when both Portland's BridgePort and Hopland's Mendocino Brewing overgrew their regional habitats and began sighting each other in various commercial wetlands. And there are all those Steelheads, a somewhat mystifying spawn.

There are truly some funny things going on with names these days. Often they are used to obscure and obfuscate, to misdirect the scrutiny of a curious public. Take the irreverently pitched products of the Plank Road Brewing Company. The copy in the Red Dog beer ads may look like linotype, or the devious cut-and-paste job of a ransom note, but it's from the same cloth as Lite and Miller Genuine Draft. Graphics be damned -- we're too busy making millions of barrels of ruggedly individualistic beer to care about how our ads look! Samuel Adams, the quality of whose contract-produced beers generally silences critics of the practice, has introduced a new contract line in the Northwest under the fiercely innocuous name of Oregon Brewing. Though not the equal of its parent company's best brews, Oregon's beers are unremarkably decent, no doubt aimed with pinpoint accuracy at the curious but unaware.

What's this all about? Well, product proliferation. Shelf space. Tap handles. Increasingly comprehensive product lines produced by a decreasing number of breweries, available, in many cases, from a single distributor. The subversion of diversity. Money. It's even gotten to the point where even the smallest brewers feel that in order to be taken seriously, to stay viable in an increasingly competitive marketplace, they need to play the same game. When I see an ad in my local alternative paper for some new beer, I think here we go again -- it's the latest alcoholic version of OK soda, another bland industrial product with a knotty pine name. Even when it turns out to be a new brew from my friendly crosstown rival, a new brew with a completely discrete graphic "look" when compared to the same brewery's other products. How else can I interpret it than as some kind of micro-styled subterfuge, designed to sprawl across that much more tap territory in my local watering holes?

Zealots are great, I'm afraid, for pointing the finger at versions of themselves less pure than what they wish they could be. Hence the intimation that this burgeoning of names, beers, and even breweries cataleptic and nonexistent is something less than legitimate. Even I think sometimes that it's cheating, and wonder why people (and breweries) can't own up to who they are and where they make what they do. None of this information will affect the quality of the beer, merely its perception. To lurk in the shadows the way so many do can only engender cynicism, and ultimately hurt the movement by incrementally causing us to become what we've rebelled against. From stories of Promethean fire (water, malt, hops and yeast, and nothing else -- take that, you Olympians, Milwaukeeans and St. Louisans), in which the true gift of real beer was wrested from complacent industrial gods, we threaten to adopt a narrative tone more reminiscent of Mr. Mysterious & Co., having far more to do with frontier opportunism and charlatanry.