The Name Game
People drink with their eyes. That’s what they say. So the rule is to create bold, beautiful, cool, trendy, colourful artwork that stands out in fridges and instagram grids. The problem is they all stand out now. Which means none of them do.
Now the thing to do in order to stand out is to create simple, plain designs with nearly nothing on them at all. Those ones stand out. We should all get onboard quickly.
Of course, everyone’s arty tastes are as diverse as their beery tastes, so some designs will resonate more than others. There will be designs that just put off a drinker. For some reason I find black and white photos on cans and wine bottles a bit weird, so my eyes just seem to skip over them. I can’t explain it.
And there will be drinkers tricked into picking something because of a cool, jaunty graphic where they later realise the beer isn’t for them. I’ve done this countless times. I’ve even tried a style I know I don’t like because, you know, “it looks cool, it can’t be bad”. It was bad.
Most of the Hand Brew Co designs are created by the incredible Hello Marine, our artist in residence. Check out her work and buy some art! We also have an awesome design by David Shrigley (Toadlicker) and Sophie Winder (Wiener Dawg) as part of our Art You Can Drink collabs programme. I’ll do a blog about the art soon.
Another way to cut through is with the name.
But how to name a beer? There are so many options. So many themes out there that brewers have picked - too many to comment on here. But one thing’s for sure, it’s great fun when you pick a theme and hit a seam and it runs and runs. If it connects in some way to the place, the people, or to an element of your brand, excellent. If it connects to your brewery name, even better. It should all hang together nicely.
I think the most important thing is consistency, regardless of how meaningful or meaningless the names are. If they’re all stupid, keep them stupid. If they’re all clever and witty, good luck, keep it up. Whatever route you pick, create a convention - a set of rules - that can guide the naming process. Naming things is big business. There are quite a few famous naming agencies and consultants out there in the brand world.
Our brewery business was born in our tiny Brighton Brewpub, the Hand in Hand, and so - maybe obviously, maybe lazily - the names of our first beers were based on hand signals or gestures. It didn’t occur to us at the time of our birth that we might make more beers than there are appropriate hand signs, so we had a rethink.
I’m a bit obsessed with short abstract names. I like them to be relatively uniform and easy to read (accessible) on the cans, clips and badges, so aside from the occasional outlier, the convention became: short, abstract.
Even where research is done and meaning is hidden within the letters, they can appear, at first glance, to be meaningless. I don’t mind that at all. When it’s unnecessary to understand the meaning, but the word is easy to say, early judgement can be suspended. It can even feel exotic, or at least stand out amongst the familiar.
Our top-selling, award-winning pale ale, Shaka, gets its name from the Hawaiian hand gesture for ‘hang-loose’, amongst other friendly greetings. I’m sure you’re familiar with the gesture - extending the thumb and smallest finger while holding the three middle fingers curled, turning the hand back and forth for emphasis.
There are a number of theories about the origins of the gesture beyond its attribution to surf culture. I like the story of the Spanish immigrants on the island that communicated ‘sharing a drink’ by bringing the thumb to their mouths and tilting, as if drinking from a bottle.
The locally accepted version is from the early 1900s when a sugar mill worker called Hamana Kalili lost his three middle fingers. Unable to do his job, he was moved to the sugar train as a guard. His ‘all-clear’ wave was picked up by the local kids and Shaka was born.
Hamana Kalili has his own statue, and legislation passed in 2024 making it the official gesture of the state of Hawaii. I wonder what the official gesture of the UK would be. I can have a guess. I’m not sure it would be as pleasant as Hawaii’s.
Other beers we make that maintain a hand reference are:
our cask oat pale, High Five. A super obvious one, but it does the trick. We made a Low Five once too.
our award-winning bitter, Bird - a Bird in the Hand, of course, although some people would like it to be ‘flipping the bird’. I refer back to the question of the UK’s official national gesture.
our cask oatmeal stout, Chop - chopping using the blade of your hand.
our coffee porter, Tamper - a coffee tamper is a tool used to pack ground coffee into an espresso basket.
our annual special old ale, A-OK - meaning ‘I am OK’ or ‘are you OK?’.
We obviously toyed with the idea of beer puns for all our beers. It's a very tempting strategy. Punnery along with sarcasm is the highest, most respected form of wit after all.
When the team developed our Dry Irish Stout with the intention of it replacing Guinness at our pub, we excitedly liked ‘Toucan Play That Game’. Alas, it turned out that another brewery (probably more) had tried this name out and were sent a cease and desist order by the dark lords, so it was back to the drawing board for us.
I started researching old stories about the origins of stouts and porters. Guinness was based on the old London porters. So I read a lot about them. There’s actually a book called The Porters of London (Walter M Stern), which is about the actual porters and their lives - a treasure trove. Down in the rabbit hole somewhere, I ended up reading about Anchor Brewing Company.
Anchor Brewing was one of America’s first microbreweries created by Ernst Baruth and his son-in-law Otto Schinkel after buying a brewery from Gottlieb Brekle. Anchor Brewing has an interesting 127 year history, including the purchase in 1965 by a man called Frederick Louis Maytag the Third, which is a great name.
Otto though. That’s a great name too. It’s also short and relatively abstract in the context of a stout. It also looks good, graphically. So our stout became Otto. It’s as simple as that. Check out my article about all things Guinnish here.
Our first lager was called Yuba - not a hand sign. This name came from researching the origins of lagers, or more specifically the yeast used to make lagers. It's common to assume that the yeast originated in Europe - Germany or Czech Republic. But it might not be that clear.
Studies show that the yeast probably had its origins in South America. The Argentine-Chili border to be precise. A yeast called Saccharomyces eubayanus is now known as the ‘lost parent’ of lager beer. Here, read about it yourself in this article. They believe this yeast travelled in the ship timbers between the Americas and Europe. I think it’s a great story.
So I bastardised Eubayanus to Yuba. Probably the better half of the word to steal.
Unfortunately, like Anchor Brewing, Yuba is no longer with us. A few other beers of ours have come and gone with interesting names like Corna (hand sign of the horns), Paper (we were going to start a Rock, Paper, Scissors theme), Yes, Ily (I think this must be Yes, I love you, but I can’t remember), Dap (bumping fists), Tickler and Quicker Than The Eye (the hand is quicker than the eye). Maybe we can reuse some of these as enough time has passed.
Our current core lager is called 795 - an award-winning ‘low-mile lager’. This gets its name from the amount of miles the ingredients collectively travelled to get to our brewery. We wanted to create a traditional tasting Pilsner-style lager, but with ingredients sourced closer to home. By using predominantly British ingredients, we were able to reduce the mileage by 80%. Not quite on convention, but it is short and abstract. So it’s allowed.
For our Art You Can Drink collabs, our partners come up with those names, so they don’t need to fit with our naming convention.
David Shrigley had a piece where a man was licking a toad’s back (originally a frog, but you know, it’s the same thing). Toad in the Hole (the game) was spreading through Brighton like wildfire, and we had just opened our new pub, The Toad in The Hole in Worthing, so Toadlicker was perfect.
Chef, recipe writer and hot honey hero, Ben Lippett came up with Wiener Dawg in the first 20 seconds of us talking about the collab. He had the song Sports by Viagra Boys* in his head, which became the theme song to his Wiener Dawg video. Great beer name - beer and hotdogs - everyone gets it. *See my note on band names later in this article.
When it comes to specials, we recently introduced a code convention, where the style is the most important thing on the badge and the name is simple numbers (à la 24:01, 24:02, 24:03 - see if you can crack the code). I wrote about this in the Hand Specials article, here.
However, naming our specials can’t be a strict practice, as some specials are more special than others and really do need an identity.
Take our International Women’s Day Dark Mild. This was a beer made out of love of community and solidarity, of shared vision, hope and drive. There was no way this was getting a simple number.
Our head brewer, Kate, did some research and found an inspiring story about solicitor Tess Gill and journalist Anna Coote, who in 1982 won a sex discrimination case after they were denied service at a Fleet Street wine bar. Gill & Coote was born.
Kate teamed up with Kelly from Bristol’s Good Chemistry Brewing and created a stunning saison - named Beta - made with 30 kilos of freshly baked beetroot and caraway. Aside from Beta meaning Beetroot in latin, this was a collab between two breweries (Beta being the second letter in the Greek alphabet), but it’s also beta-testing, which is the process of piloting and improving through live testing on a real audience (which has a bit of a science vibe and creates a nice link to Good Chemistry). That all came together perfectly.
Brewer Henry, made a Sticke Bier special named Sparren. I had to look Sticke Bier up, but essentially it’s a style of Alt Bier. I had to look Alt Bier up too. It refers to the old style of top-fermenting beers in Germany. ‘Sticke’ means secret and refers to the gossiping around the ingredients used by the brewer. So we came up with Sparren, which loosely means rafters, where people can eavesdrop from.
In summary, names are very important to get right. They need to do a number of things - grab your attention, have some kind of story, meaning or resonance, and be easy to pronounce. But at the same time, they need to feel right and travel well (they shouldn’t only make sense in your own town).
A great deal of effort usually goes into creating a band name. But when you think about band names, quite a lot of them, at face value, are bizarre and sometimes awful. It’s only when the band becomes a success and the name is repeated over and over that the name becomes relatively meaningless (semantic satiation is what that’s called).
The weird knot of letters or words become associated with the success of the band, the band itself or that great summer they released that great song. They can become a powerful personal reference to friendship, good times, nostalgia.
I mean, ‘Arctic Monkeys’ is a pretty poor name, but look at them now (although I did hear someone call them ‘dad-rock’ the other day, which was pretty depressing). You’d never think of actual monkeys from the Arctic ever again.
There’s a band called Car Seat Headrest. Dry Cleaning’s a horrible chore. Good band. Wet Leg, what now? (although I do like the meaning of that one). The list is endless. I guess this is all pretty subjective though.
So I think of semantic satiation a lot. The idea of an abstract beer name - that may or may not have some deep and meaningful story for us - is just an easy meaningless word for our customers. Hopefully they are repeated enough that they just represent the success or fondness of the beer itself.
When I think of the word Shaka now, I think of sunshine through a yellowy, golden pale ale. It means happiness and good times with my friends and family.