How Do You Name a New Beer?
With new releases coming off our tanks all the time, one of the questions our marketing team gets asked most often is simply: “How do you come up with new names?” It’s a great question, and one that has a few different steps, most of which give us an exciting opportunity to explore and expand the Mast Landing creative universe.
The naming process always starts with the recipe. Our goal is for each new release to have a coherent ethos to it. The first sip you take of the beer should evoke similar feelings to the first glance at the label. If we’ve done our job well, the name helps capture the beer’s story and essence, creating a full experience that spans creative to consumption.
Sunspotting - our dry hopped American lager - is a great example of this. Even before we ever tasted it, we knew that the recipe was going to produce a crisp, refreshing beer, with bright citrus notes from the Simcoe Noble hops. All of our potential concepts worked in the same realm as those descriptors, exploring light, luminance, and simplicity.
Now that we’ve started to define the universe that the beer’s name and story will exist in, we can toss around some words and phrases that might make sense to incorporate. Sometimes this early process of riffing on ideas sparks a direction that we pursue beyond what we had already imagined.
Take Canyons & Gemstonesfor example - a double IPA that we brewed to showcase Yakima Chief Hops’ Idaho 7 varietal. Given that the recipe was heavily focused on Idaho 7 hops, our initial thoughts brought up imagery from the Pacific Northwest, where Yakima Chief’s farms are, and where the varietal was developed. Visually the landscape felt broad and vast, with pockets of hidden beauty everywhere to be found. Sure enough, Idaho is known as “The Gem State”, and that little nugget led us to a name that captured Idaho’s history and the beautiful topography that spans up to the Yakima valley.
The continued exploration that happens in our production facility also opens up opportunities to thematically tie names together. Since early 2020, our brewers have been working on a series of West Coast inspired IPAs. The goal is to produce timeless beers that pay homage to the origins of the American IPA, while incorporating modern brewing practices and ingredients.
In the spirit of that mission, we tapped into the lexicon of one of the West Coast’s great musical acts - The Grateful Dead - for source material on the naming side.
Caught Up In Sunlight, Long Distance Runner, Find Me Dreaming, and Firelight’s Aglow are unique beers, tied together by their names through the lyrics of The Grateful Dead. On the creative side, this allows us to tell the story of the West Coast inspired IPA series through a connected language. Each beer is able to stand alone with a unique name and label, but together they tell a deeper story about how we’re approaching new recipe development at Mast Landing.
The opportunity to weave a throughline across these beers has helped our followers trace from beer to beer, and given us a huge source of naming ideas.
Now, we can’t forget to mention the fact that naming beers can sometimes be just a whole lot of fun. When our production team proposed a huge double IPA that featured Sabro, Citra, and Mosaic hops, the consensus was clear: a beer that big needed an over-the-top name. We tapped into our obsession with Netflix’s sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave for the name This Beer is Everything!
Getting love for the reference from fans of the show across the world, and even from the actor on the label, was about as awesome as we could have hoped for. Using the names of our beers to share our excitement and joy with others is a big part of why we love the work we do.
With so many new beers out there, it may seem like lots of names are already claimed (and we always check to make sure we’re not stepping on toes), but with the right combination of deep inspiration, narrative curiosity, and goofy energy naming a new beer can be a fun process that helps tell a deeper story about who we are as people, and as a brewery.
