What's in a Name

Sheffield United 1 v Rochdale 0

Saturday 13 September 2014

Twitter @ball_sup

I went a bit mad in The Rutland Arms & it got me thinking about Beer names.  I do like The Rutland Arms.  From my side of the bar, it has a straightforward beer model. House cask beers from Blue Bee & guest casks. Usually a Magic Rock keg, often a Summer Wine keg and some good guest kegs.  I passed on the Acorn keg, the Summer Wine milk stout & the Siren/To Ol Tickle Monster.

I went for a stout & a porter.  The stout was Blue Bee Inhov The Black at 7%.  The thing is, the pump clip was in faux Cyrillic script - a wrong way round N, etc.  Of course, having just got back from Moldova, I’ve spent 4 days trying to decipher real Cyrillic script.  Being a mathematician, I’m not too bad at spotting the letters and pronounciation.  Well, like an idiot, I didn’t realise at first that the fake Cyrillic spelling on Inhov The Black was a play on spellling/words of an expression in Snooker.  So, I was actually pre-programmed to try & decipher it - and of course, you can’t.  I even asked about the bar staff about the pronunciation. They must have thought I was mad.  The beer was lovely,

The porter was The Hop Studio Porter at 4.3%. That was great as well. I got chocolate straight away. I’m no expert, but I thought/hoped the chocolate flavour was coming from the malt, rather than through having chocolate chucked in.

Anyway. It got me thinking. Do we want our beer names to do what it says on the tin (The Hop Studio - PORTER)? Or to amuse us (Blue Bee - Inhov The Black)?

I do find myself asking too many times - “what sort of beer is that?”

So, I do lean a bit towards the simple descriptive names.  Oh, and don’t get me started on IPAs which don’t taste like IPAs.