August 6, 2008
For Part One of the World’s Worst-Sounding Booze Brand Names click here.
(This is the second part of a blog that originally appeared on Cracked.com. Since Cracked has space considerations, and we most definitely do not, here is the remainder of the full list. To see the list as it appeared on Cracked, click here This version contains a few horrendous booze-branding choices that didn’t make it into the final entry. To sip your favorite fermented beverage while enjoying part two, don’t click anything; just manipulate the down arrow on the keyboard as appropriate.)
Arnold Palmer Cabernet Sauvignon
Golf, to say the least, is lacking in youthful verve. It’s one of a handful of sports whose physical demands are so minimal it can be played while attached to an IV drip, which can be hauled around in your golf cart, if you don’t take any sharp curves. And here’s a wine that won’t appeal to anybody other than the old duffer whose handicap is possibly dropping stone dead on the 9th green.
What the Company Might Have Intended: Celebrity endorsements can be lucrative, especially if product and pitchman are well-paired, like Donald Trump and his vodka, which like all vodkas is transparent and tasteless. It works best though, if the median age of the fan base isn’t older than jokes about how old people are, material more well-tread than the starting line of the Boston Marathon and more tired than the finish.
Why This Marketing Ploy is Heading Toward the Bunker: Arnold Palmer is not named Tiger Woods, and the differences don’t even begin to end there: for one thing, they are clearly two different people (we confirmed this by looking at them). If you break a bottle of Palmer out at the dinner table, your date will think you wrested away a family heirloom by posing as a distant relative, www.deadoraliveinfo.com will be consulted and a generation gap will appear wider than that between The Big Bopper and 50 Cent—if you’re old enough to remember the Big Bopper, your parents hand-forged their own clubs and were Palmer fan club members during the Dust Bowl years.
Goats Do Roam Wine
Just the right touch for any intimate gathering with friends, an oddly named wine that reminds you of a garbage-eating oversexed animal with a poor disposition.
What the Company Might Have Intended: Goats have been associated with virility since ancient times, well, not so much goats but whoever first decided to cross that interspecies divide and mate with one and spawn a Satyr. While perversions that would shame the mayor of Amsterdam have been etched into Grecian urns since antiquity, the Goats Do Roam label is decidedly quaint, and details some legend or another involving a Yemeni herder that we cannot make out even by squinting. We imagine such a fable involves a goat say, wandering off the edge of a precipice, at which point a wizened herder remarks to his young upstart, ‘See, goats DO roam’.
Why We’re not Ordering Another Round: Lumbering ruminants such as water buffalo, antelope, bison or anything else that could be pot-shotted from the comfort of a passing train are not to be associated with the liquid portion of any meal.
Bürgerbräu Bad Reichenhall Suffikator
From the land of euphonious-sounding beer names, Germany, comes Bürgerbräu Bad Reichenhall Suffikator, a premium doppelbock beer, or a hasty confession to a murder charge, we’re not quite sure which.
What the Company Might Have Intended: For the most part we avoided including beers with foreign names just because they had an icepick-like effect on our ears, such as the Belgian Affligem Paters Vat (shiver), or even English names that just somehow nauseate by their very sound – like “Norfolk Nog”. Germany is home to some of the best beer in the world – maybe the best and they also like to drink it in giant steins with food that’ll kill you before you leave the table, so the country’s boozing credentials are solid. Deutschland is also home to the highest concentration of booze brand names that sound like biblical plagues – reference the many ‘Hell’ beers, ala Bock Hell (hell means “light” in German). The first part of this one is the name of the brewer and using our German acquired from a week of Teutonic swimming lessons, we can guess that it means something like “Richard’s Castle Natural Springwater” or something like that. Suffikator is the actual name of the beer.
Why They Failed: Suffikator is the actual name of the beer. Taken as a whole, this beer’s name has one too many umlauts for comfort and sounds like some period in the Middle Ages when people laid around dying from pestilence while bleeding from the eyes. But given how often German is similar to English – (Maus = mouse, Bier = beer, Katze = Cat, Hund = dog/hound) – the Suffikator part, for which we could not find a translation, makes it just that bit more mercenary-sounding. This might well be a terrific beer – and doppelbock does mean double-strength so it’s certainly got some fire power – but we’re guessing this will not make much of a splash on American store shelves until its name is changed to something that does not conjure up the image of a nutcase going around with plastic bags and bad intentions.
Zodiac Vodka / Nostradamus Beer
When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will rule the planet, and yet this will still go unsold in bars.
If a conversation with the opposite sex drifts, like medical waste onto a Jersey beach, to the topic of the various phases of the moon and how they really do affect a person’s menstrual cycle and Nostradamus’s thoughts on the sub-prime mortgage crisis, it’s best to back away slowly, and fake an impromptu exit — citing a dry cleaner who closes early for the afternoons. This is unless, of course, your last sexual experience was long enough ago to have exceeded at least 3 zones of celestial longitude.
What the Company Might Have Intended: Tapping into superstition and supposed divination of either ancient firmamental noodlings or the gout-addled ramblings of a 16th century French druggist is niche marketing of sorts, even if this niche is narrower than Nicole Richie in profile.
Why They Failed and, Apropos of Nothing, How the Moon in Venus’ Sign Means you Should Cease Mortgage Payments Immediately: Approaching a woman and slurring ‘hey baby, what’s your sign?’ is questionable behavior at the best of times, let alone inviting mockery by using a prop (in the event that your state’s liquor laws enable you to order a jug to have all to yourself). If not, you’ll have to simply invite her to share a belt of Zodiac Vodka with you, mention “I’m a Taurus’ by way of introduction, at which point any objections we’ve raised here will drift through her mind in less time than it takes to make a quick dash to the powder room for reasons undisclosed. We prophesize diminishing market share for these products.
Essex Boys Bitter/The Bishop’s Finger
We’ve opted for prudence and to refrain from commenting on this pair of UK beers out of a fear of reprisals from the Catholic Church. Suffice it to say it’s advisable to knock twice before entering any confessional within a one-mile radius of a pub with these two on tap.
Cloudy Bay Chardonnay
If you’re making plonk in an abandoned garage, and planning on having a great unveiling of the saran wrap at the neighborhood flophouse, you’d be forgiven for having a product that looks like something that would bubble up from a bog as you swat away the flies. We’re not saying this product looks like that, but with a name like this one would not want to risk one’s eyesight by sampling a glass.
What the Company Might Have Intended: This product was produce in a place called Cloudy Bay, New Zealand. But if I’m a maker of frozen seafood products and I hail from Botulism Springs, Manitoba, would I feel the need to give a shout out to the home town? Unless you skipped marketing 101 and the guy whose notes you borrowed dropped dead mid-semester, you’d realize that “cloudy” is not going to attract any intended demographic. The adjective, whether it refers to urine and the need for a hasty a referral to a specialist, inclement weather that ruins an otherwise perfectly good day at the beach, (or for that matter one’s judgment when it comes to naming your product) never connotes anything positive.
Why They Failed and Why Breweries Learned Long Ago that No Matter how Flat the Countryside, it’s Best not to Draw Attention to It as this Can Be Misconstrued: In day one of sommelier school, after thorough instructions on how best to condescend to the customer, and how to scrub Chianti out of a silk tie using nothing but the hem of a waitress’ skirt and a blob of saliva, it is noted that clarity rather than cloudiness is much-sought after in a dinner wine. As a general rule, you don’t want to be gazing across the table through glassware that looks like an aquarium someone’s put out on the curb.
Shingleback Shiraz
Awaiting test results from the lab on this Aussie oddity.
What the Company Might Have Intended: It’s well known that there are as many beaver shots in Canadian tourism materials as there are in those forwards you get from the guy in IT, and Canada is not alone as a country that likes to celebrate its indigenous creatures. Australians too take pride in their wildlife, as evidenced by Steve Irwin before he uttered his last “Crikey!”. Like grungy backpackers, shingleback lizards roam large parts of Australia, especially Bondi beach, whereas shingles of the variety not installed on your roof by ex-cons, is the common name of the nervous disorder Herpes Zoster, and it can be found roaming many more beaches than this lizard. You can see why they changed the name as a casual mention of ‘Shingles’ rather than ‘Herpes’ in polite conversation implies to the casual eavesdropper that you might’ve had some home reno done, rather than having slept your way through the entire baritone section of the varsity glee club.
Why We’re Getting a Doctor’s Second Opinion Instead of Ordering Another Round: Ordering a bottle of a skin condition that commonly presents itself as red marks on your back that aren’t caused by fingernails having dug into it in the throes of passion might result in a goodnight peck on the cheek and a round of antivirals on the house if the more positive connotation, in this case a disgustingly slimy lizard, isn’t the first thing that springs to mind.
Special Mention:
Pruno
Did you make it through today’s recreation period without getting shanked by Phil the Fish? Looking to celebrate? Pour yourself a glass of Pruno!
What the “Company” Might Have Intended: Alas there is no CEO of Pruno Industries, and chances are that you would not want to sit on the board if there were, as a hostile takeover would likely mean being attacked by a guy who spent the previous night fashioning a deadly weapon out of his toothbrush. “Pruno” is the term given to prison wine and Jarvis Masters, a man sitting on death row in San Quentin Penitentiary, is credited with popularizing the term “Pruno”, in a 1992 poem entitled, “The Wine of My Youth Was Pruno”… actually it was called, “Recipe for Prison Pruno”. The poem coupled bits of the verdict that was read out on the day that Masters was sent up the river with practical tips on how to make prison Pruno: “Take ten peeled oranges/Jarvis Masters, it is the judgment and sentence of this court.” Since penning that little ditty, Masters has had plenty of time to perfect his Pruno-making abilities as he remains on death row to this day.
While most modern-day recipes for Pruno do not specifically call for prunes, and one would suspect that this is not the most popular fruit for prisoners, we would assume that at one point it contained prunes and was thus dubbed “Pruno”.
Why We’re Going to Be Good, Law-Abiding Citizens: Pruno is a sickening-sounding name as is anything derived or related to prunes, a fruit typically employed to keep the elderly regular. Then again it would be hard to come up with an attractive-sounding name for the kind of booze that can be made by anyone using only fruit, ketchup, sugar, a plastic bag, hot running water, and a sock. Whereas the worst aftereffects of a bender on the outside would be the unwelcome sight of someone only passable with beer goggles asking you how you like your eggs the following morning, the aftereffects of Pruno include blindness, death, irresistible urge to instigate a riot, and death in a prison riot. In a trend that must just tickle every poor slob who has had to drink the stuff in jail, Pruno is now being “enjoyed” outside of prison. In 2004, at the American Homebrewer’s Association’s National Homebrew Conference in Las Vegas, a “Make Your Own Pruno” competition was held. The winner was dragged out of his hotel room in the middle of the night by security guards and beaten with bars of soap tied up in pillow cases.
CLICK HERE FOR PART ONE OF THE WORLD’S WORST-SOUNDING BOOZE BRAND NAMES!
