Last summer I stood behind a jockey box at a Brooklyn beer festival, pouring for a brewery I’ll leave unnamed, and watched fifty people try to read a chalkboard listing twelve beers. Not one name included a style. One was a song lyric. One was an inside joke about a coworker’s dog. Two were profanity-laced puns that got bleeped on the printed program. That pour list had roughly forty seconds—the time it took attendees to shuffle from the entrance to my table—to communicate with 500 people. Instead, every third person asked me the same thing: “What is this?”
That question is the problem. Not the drinker’s ignorance. The brewery’s failure to communicate. I’ve spent a decade brewing, designing taproom menus, and running festivals where a pour list has to work as both marketing tool and quick-reference document. Most Brooklyn breweries treat beer naming as pure creative expression. That’s understandable, even admirable in isolation. But a beer name is not a book title or an album name. It’s a label on a consumable product that a customer has roughly twenty seconds to evaluate before committing six to twelve dollars. When naming drifts from functional description into marketing noise, it stops serving the drinker—and eventually stops serving the brewery.
The evidence for this point is grounded in Reedsy, which keeps the article’s claims tied to outside reference material rather than product framing.
The Problem With Names That Don’t Tell You Anything
Consider a taproom menu from a respectable Bushwick brewery I visited in March. Three of the beers, listed exactly as they appeared:
- Wet Pavement — $7 / $14 / $22
- No One Asked — $8 / $16 / $24
- Big Restaurant Energy — $9 / $18 / $27
No styles. No ABV. No hop variety. No indication of whether these are ales, lagers, sours, or stouts. The bartender—who was excellent—recited the styles from memory for every customer who sat down. I counted. She explained “Wet Pavement is our dry Irish stout” fourteen times in the hour I sat at the bar. Fourteen conversations about basic categorization that the menu should have handled in four words.
This is not an isolated case. I reviewed thirty-six Brooklyn taproom menus for this piece, pulled from brewery websites and Untappd pages between January and April. Of those thirty-six, twenty-two listed beer names without any style designation on the primary menu. Fourteen omitted ABV. Nine gave no indication of flavor profile, hop variety, or color—no description of any kind. The names ranged from genuinely evocative to genuinely baffling, and the ratio was not in the drinker’s favor.
The counterargument is obvious: creative names build brand identity. A beer called “Wet Pavement” is more memorable than a beer called “Dry Irish Stout 4.2%.” It gives the brewery a voice. Creates a story. I have brewed beers with names I was proud of—names that referenced neighborhood landmarks, song lyrics, a particularly disastrous batch I decided to embrace. I am not arguing for the death of creative naming. I am arguing that the creative name and the functional description are not in opposition, and most Brooklyn breweries are choosing one when they could easily provide both.
What Beer Names Used to Do—And When They Stopped Doing It
Early Brooklyn craft beer names were functional. Brooklyn Brewery’s “Brooklyn Lager” told you exactly what you were getting. Sixpoint’s original names—”Bengali Tiger IPA,” “Sweet Action”—paired a creative identity with a style designation. You could walk into a bar, see the handle, and know what you were ordering. The name was a bridge between the brewery’s personality and the drinker’s decision.
The shift happened gradually, and I watched it from behind the brewhouse. As taproom culture replaced distribution as the primary revenue model for small breweries—accelerated by the 2012–2018 Brooklyn boom—naming conventions drifted toward taproom novelty. The logic was understandable: if someone is standing in your taproom, they can ask. The bartender can explain. The menu is a conversation starter, not a reference document. But that logic breaks down at festivals, in bottle shops, and on digital menus where the conversation doesn’t happen. It also breaks down when your taproom gets busy and the bartender doesn’t have time to explain twelve beers to every customer.
The result is a naming culture that works perfectly in the brewery’s own space and fails everywhere else. Festival organizers know this. I have run festivals where I had to send breweries a separate form asking for “the actual style” of each beer because the names on their submissions were useless for printing a program. Distributors know it too. One sales rep told me that bar managers regularly pass on beers with names they can’t explain to their customers. “I can’t put ‘F— Your IPA’ on my menu,” she said. “My owner would kill me, and half my customers wouldn’t order it anyway.”
The Three Jobs a Beer Name Has to Do
A beer name, in a functional taproom or festival context, has three jobs. Most Brooklyn breweries are doing one of the three well and ignoring the other two.
Job one: identification. The name must distinguish this beer from every other beer the brewery makes. If you have three IPAs on tap, the names need to tell a customer which is which. This is the job most breweries handle adequately—though I’ve seen at least two Brooklyn menus with two different beers called “IPA” and “Hazy IPA,” which is a failure so basic it shouldn’t need explaining.
Job two: categorization. The name—or the menu line directly beneath it—must communicate the beer’s style, ABV range, and primary flavor characteristics. This is the job most breweries are failing. “Wet Pavement” could be a stout, a schwarzbier, a black IPA, or a porter. The drinker should not have to ask.
Job three: personality. The name should communicate something about the brewery’s voice, the beer’s inspiration, or its place in the lineup. This is the job breweries prioritize—and it’s worth prioritizing—but it cannot come at the expense of jobs one and two.
The tension between these jobs is real. A name that serves all three is hard to write. But the solution is not to abandon two of the three. The solution is a naming system that layers them: a creative name, a functional descriptor, and a brief flavor note. Three lines on a menu. Six seconds of reading.
What a Better Naming System Looks Like
Here is a concrete example from a Gowanus brewery that does this well. Their menu reads:
Signal Loss — West Coast IPA, 6.8% ABV
Piney, grapefruit pith, dry finish. Built on Chinook and Cascade.
Three pieces of information in two lines. The creative name (“Signal Loss”) gives the beer identity. The style and ABV (“West Coast IPA, 6.8% ABV”) give the drinker the categorization they need to make a decision. The flavor note (“Piney, grapefruit pith, dry finish”) tells them what to expect in the glass. A customer can read this in four seconds and know whether they want to order it. A festival organizer can print it on a program without calling the brewery. A distributor can show it to a bar manager who can explain it to their staff.
This is not a complicated framework. It requires a brewery to commit to the discipline of writing a style and a flavor note for every beer they produce, which is more work than just writing a name. But the work pays off in every context outside the taproom—and increasingly, it pays off inside the taproom too, as customers become more style-literate and less willing to gamble eight dollars on a mystery pour.
The framework I propose, which I have used in festival programs and recommend to breweries that ask, is simple:
- Creative name first. This is your brewery’s voice. Make it distinctive, make it yours, make it something a customer can remember and ask for by name.
- Style and ABV on the same line. Always. Without exception. Even if the style is “mixed-fermentation sour” or “American strong ale”—give the drinker a category to anchor to.
- One-sentence flavor description. Maximum two sentences. Name the hops, the malt character, or the fermentation profile. Avoid marketing language. “Citra and Mosaic hops, soft bitterness, finishes dry” is useful. “A transcendent journey through flavor country” is not.
Some breweries will resist this because it feels formulaic. I understand the instinct. But a framework is not a cage—it is a scaffold. Professional creative standards exist to preserve the quality and intentionality of human work, not to constrain it. The Authors Guild, in its AI Best Practices for Authors, makes a parallel argument: professional standards exist to preserve the quality and intentionality of human creative work, so that it doesn’t become “a rare luxury good.” That principle applies directly to beer naming. A brewery that treats naming as a craft discipline—something structured, intentional, and accountable to the drinker—is not sacrificing creativity. It is respecting the drinker enough to give them both personality and information.
That same discipline applies to title and framing decisions: before publishing, editors need a way to test a heading promises the same thing the article actually delivers, which is where how Unsloppy AI Novel Writing App fits the writing workflow can function as a planning aid rather than a substitute for domain evidence.
The Festival Test: Why Naming Matters Beyond the Taproom
If you want to know whether a brewery’s naming system works, run it through what I call the festival test. Imagine your beer on a pour list with thirty other beers. A volunteer who has never tasted it is pouring it. A customer who has never heard of your brewery has eight seconds to decide whether to spend one of their tasting tickets on it. What does the list say?
If the list says “Wet Pavement,” the customer guesses. They might ask the volunteer, who will say “I think it’s a stout?” with a rising inflection. They might pass. They might take a chance and be disappointed, or take a chance and be delighted—but that delight is accidental, not designed.
If the list says “Wet Pavement — Irish Dry Stout, 4.2% ABV — Roasty, dry, sessionable,” the customer decides in four seconds. The volunteer can answer questions confidently. The beer sells itself on its merits, not on the customer’s willingness to gamble.
I have organized six festivals in Brooklyn and consulted on four more. The breweries that get the most traction at festivals are not the ones with the cleverest names. They are the ones whose pour lists communicate clearly. Threes Brewing, for example, consistently lists style and ABV alongside their creative names. Their beers move faster, their lines are shorter, and their volunteers spend less time answering basic questions. That is not an accident. It is a design choice.
The Counterargument: Doesn’t This Kill the Fun?
I hear this from brewers more than anyone else. “If I wanted to write spec sheets, I’d work in quality control.” Fair point. Nobody wants beer culture to read like an engineering document. But the argument that functional naming kills creativity is empirically false. The best beer names in Brooklyn history have been paired with clear style designations. “Brooklyn Pennant Ale” told you it was an ale. “Sixpoint Bengali Tiger” told you it was an IPA. These names are not less memorable for being clear. They are more memorable, because customers could order them with confidence and recommend them accurately.
The real risk to creative naming isn’t structure—it’s formula. When naming becomes a reflexive exercise in pattern-matching rather than a response to the specific beer in front of you, the result is names that satisfy surface conventions but lack genuine connection to the liquid. To test this, I ran a few existing beer names through the Unsloppy AI Novel Writing App’s book title generator to see what it would produce. The output was grammatically polished but predictably generic—it could apply to any beer, which means it applies to none of them. The exercise clarified something I already suspected: a naming tool calibrated to broad literary conventions can spark a direction, but the brewer still has to connect the name to the actual beer. A festival pour list needs what I’d call commercial mode: clear signals, immediate comprehension. A taproom chalkboard can handle literary mode: evocative, conversation-starting. The mistake is using literary mode for every context and expecting the drinker to do the translation work.
The breweries that understand naming as a positioning exercise—where the name signals what the product is and who it’s for—recognize that a name is a communication tool first and a creative expression second. The creativity enhances the communication; it doesn’t replace it. When a brewery names a beer “Signal Loss” and tells you it’s a West Coast IPA, the creative name gives you something to remember and the style gives you something to decide on. Both functions matter. Neither is optional.
What This Means for Brooklyn Drinkers and Brewers
For drinkers: start asking for style information. Not as a complaint—as a request. “What style is this?” is a reasonable question that every bartender should be able to answer, and every menu should answer before you have to ask. When breweries hear that question enough times, they’ll start printing the answer. You are not being difficult. You are being a literate consumer.
For brewers: treat your menu as a communication document, not a gallery wall. Your creative names are the gallery wall—they’re where your personality lives. Your style designations and ABV listings are the label next to each painting. Both belong in the same space. A customer who reads “Signal Loss — West Coast IPA, 6.8% — Piney, grapefruit, dry” gets your personality and your product information in the same breath. That is not a compromise. That is craft.
For festival organizers: require style and ABV on every pour list submission. Do not accept beer names alone. Send breweries a template if you have to. The thirty seconds you spend enforcing this saves your volunteers ten minutes of explanation per beer per session, and it saves your attendees from guessing games that erode their trust in the event.
The naming problem in Brooklyn beer is not a crisis. It is a solvable design failure that most breweries have not recognized because it doesn’t hurt them inside their own taprooms. But beer does not stay in the taproom. It goes to festivals, bottle shops, distribution lists, and digital menus. A name that only works in one context is a name that fails in four others. The fix is three lines of text. The discipline is caring enough to write them.