Yesterday was National Beer Day. In recent years, National Beer Day has grown as commercialized as Christmas, with all sorts of promotions, festivals, and special offers attached to it. But we prefer to celebrate it in the traditional manner, like our grandfathers would have celebrated it had it not been invented in 2009 on Facebook: By drinking Grain Belts from dawn, urinating prolifically, and complaining about progress.
Around the fourth or fifth pitcher, our conversation focused on the current state of craft brewing in the U.S., which, to our palates, has essentially devolved into the current state of craft marketing. There are nearly 2500 craft breweries in the U.S. now â an increase of more than 1000 in under a decade. And we fear that all this rapid growth has led to a craft brewing bubble, a gold rush of sorts, with more and more "brewers" looking to cash in on the craze by slapping a silly name onto the same overly-hopped plonk.
Indeed, we think some of these places spend more time crafting authentic, artisanal-sounding names than they do crafting beer.
We continued to grumble about this for awhile, but then we remembered our no-nonsense, can-do grandfathers. And we thought to ourselves: Would they have just complained about this? Or would they have taken steps to make the situation better, by building a Javascript app that automatically generates craft beer names by combining flavorings, yoga poses, and beer types, so brewers can spend less time marketing and more time actually brewing quality beer?
Clearly, it was the latter. So that's what we did too. Today, in honor of our grandfathers, we give you the MB Craft Beer Name Generator.
This isn't the web's first Craft Beer Name Generator, but we believe it's the best due to our proprietary brewing recipe: take a flavoring or preparation technique, add a yoga pose or bicycle part, and finish with a beer type. So, in an instant craft breweries can achieve memorable, brandable names and focus instead on making actual beer, instead of vats of isomerized alpha acid. A few examples:
Dried Apricot Crankset Dunkelweizen
Jalapeño Crescent Moon Pumpkin Ale
Fire-Roasted Crane Pose Blonde Ale
Multigrain Half Frog ESB
Lemongrass Rearview Mirror Witbier
Try it for yourself, and let us know what you think.
The culprit that started the craft beer craze.
AP 
