August 4, 2008
(Editor’s Note: The following blog appeared first on Cracked.com. To see it there, complete with welcome jab at Dr. Phil, click here. Below is the first part of the original submission. Part Two can be found here. Reader feedback on brands that we may have missed is as welcome as a free round… almost) :
For a booze-maker, giving your hooch the right name can mean success, even if you are hustling a product that could be put to better use in the gas tanks of a fuel-hungry nation. Malt liquors like Wild Irish Rose, Night Flight, and Schlitz fall into this category, but their respective names hearken to the splendor of the Irish countryside (or a prostitute in the Irish countryside named Rose, which is still not so bad), getting high in the evening/the adrenaline that comes from sprinting away from a crime scene, and, well, Schlitz doesn’t really signify anything but it seems like it would be a fine name to give one’s first-born son – “The proud parents are thrilled to welcome little Schlitz Rasmussen into the world”. Like putting a silk hat on a pig, it’s a way of sprucing up your product and fostering a loyalty that is completely divorced from product quality – in other words, the kind of loyalty that lasts.
Just as a catchy name with positive connotations can mean success for a product with “optimal serving conditions” listed as “best served in the general proximity of someone who drinks fast”, so too can a bad name sink the fortunes of a quality product. Many of the booze brand names below have been slapped onto products that judging by reports from beer and liquor snobs on the Internet sound pretty good, but we are not going to find out just how good because their names send us dangerously close to wanting to walk the line of sobriety.
It has become trendy among booze purveyors, particularly brewers and wineries these days to give their products deliberately jokey names like “Arrogant Bastard Ale” and “Wasatch Polygamy Porter” etc., but here we’ve stuck to those that sicken or repel consumers unintentionally for the most part (passing on Sweetwater Happy Ending Imperial Stout, however, was not an option). In some cases, these names sound terrible due to language or cultural differences; in others it’s a name that started off as perfectly acceptable but later become increasingly risible as the years passed and people looked for more words with which to form double entendres; and, in the majority of cases, it was a bad name to begin with and shit doesn’t turn to gold with age.
It’s last-call, the bar has been drained of all other brands, these names are presented to us on a menu, and we opt instead to do the unthinkable and flag down a taxi. There ought to be a law.
Sweetwater Happy Ending Imperial Stout
From Sweetwater Brewery in Atlanta, Georgia comes a beer that attempts to bottle the exotic allure of getting a five-fingered shuffle from someone who may or may not have found her way into her present place of employment as part of a barter deal for a Chevrolet.
What the Company Might Have Intended: The cartoon of the winking, cleavage-bearing sexpot masseuse on the label means this wasn’t a case of someone having failed to check out the urban dictionary before naming the beer. But the description on the label, “A huge, dry hopped stiffy, for a full figured beer, resulting in an explosive finish!” suggests that perhaps this was an attempt to celebrate the defining qualities of a good stout – full-bodied, satisfying with a pleasant aftertaste etc – in a way that would stand out on the shelves. That this quotation makes no grammatical sense may have been a play on the language difficulties that confront rub and tug patrons, or point to the need for a copy-checker at Sweetwater Breweries.
Why They Failed and Why We Want to Vomit: Beer companies often get a bum rap for glorifying alcohol abuse by producing commercials that show good looking young people having the time of their lives while in the general proximity of a crapload of their product. Someone living in a converted garage, drinking Miller Genuine Draft and spraying his shirts with deodorant so he doesn’t have to do a wash, might look at those Greek statues come to life in the Miller commercials, who seem to be preparing for a cabin orgy with the Swedish Bikini Natural 10 Extra-Beautiful Club, and think that he’s a few six-packs away from joining them. That same slob would have far less mental jogging to do to make the image that Sweetwater Happy Ending Massage conjures up a reality. Even more unappealing-sounding than “Hummer”, also put out by this same brewer, this one brings to mind the altogether unpleasant image of some naked horny fat guy in a towel overcoming a language barrier by counting off sums of money using his fingers and waving a stack of greasy low-denomination bills.
From Scotland comes the perfect complement to a day spent skulking around a tranquil forest dressed up like a bush in the hopes of bagging Bambi.
What the Company Might Have Intended: A deerstalker is the kind of jaunty cap that Sherlock Holmes wears, and one that has also graced the fictitious heads of cynical low-life Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher in the Rye”, and portly truculent hotdog vendor Ignatius J. Reilly of “A Confederacy of Dunces”—lit personae you’d least like to emulate behaviorally or sartorially. In real life, most people who are able to tie their own shoes and for whom strangling by shoelaces is not a danger, don’t wear these hats. The exception, of course, are those for whom the hat is named – hunters out for a day’s drinking and shooting in the best tradition of American vice-presidents. They are presumably the target market for this whiskey.
Why They Failed and Why We Are Untying our Deerstalker Hats: This is not the whiskey to break out on a first date. First, it promotes headwear favored by those in cold climates who have severed all ties with mankind. Second, any reference to the slaughter of deer is unlikely to impress. Paired with the term “stalker”, showing up with a bottle of this falls between having BO and casually mentioning that you have a family of 10 “out there, somewhere” as a sure way to kill a date.
Dr Loosen Riesling
From along the banks of the German Rhine comes this medical malpractice suit in a bottle.
What the Company Might Have Intended: The eponymous Dr. Loosen started this winery nearly 200 years ago and the German vintner has been run by assorted Loosens since then. The founder was not, as far as we could determine, the kind of doctor who spent his off-days rambling about the German countryside and snatching women’s underwear from clotheslines. It would appear that the makers of this one never really thought too much about why their English friends were snickering under their kerchiefs, and once their export market expanded and the name of “Doc Loosen” came into hands such as ours, they were already too rich to give a Scheiße.
Why They Failed and Why The Officer Would Like to Have a Word With You Downtown: This sounds like the kind of booze you’d need to warn your teenage daughter about before she agrees to go out alone with the highschool quarterback. Booze has been helping ugly people get laid since the first caveman realized that it had its advantages over the club in terms of taking the relationship to the next level. But these days the inside of a prison cell and a standing engagement with someone who or may not want to tattoo you as his own property has lessened the acceptability of booze’s “liquid panty-removing” qualities. “Loosen up”, is of course, the most oft-heard entreaty of a teenager looking to get laid – right before the open palm of the girl he’s trying to woo hits his face. Adding the modifier “Doctor” doesn’t help. Doctor Loosen Reisling sounds like a moustache-twirling creep in a grungy white coat with breath that reeks of yesterday’s after-dinner bender and a special getting-to-know-you rate for all the young mothers in town.
Kelpie Organic Seaweed Ale
From the Argyll coast in Scotland comes a beer that will take you back to the times when you stepped in something squishy at the beach and hoped it wasn’t a turd.
What the Company Might Have Intended: According to Celtic legend, kelpies are child-killing shape-shifting water horses that can be found murdering innocents along lochs and rivers in Scotland and Ireland. The legend has it that a kelpie will appear as a lost pony on land and somehow BS a child into taking a ride on its back. The kelpie then makes a mad dash straight for the bottom of the nearest body of water, the child is unable to get off due to the creature’s skin suddenly becoming adhesive, and… we have one less citizen on the village census rolls. This all sounds like a tale concocted to cover up the baptismal boo-boos of “Dunker” Father Fred, or possibly further proof that those closest to the water drink booze in greater quantities and packing a higher punch than do their land-locked brethren. This beer is actually brewed using seaweed, a particularly disgusting-sounding strain of the stuff called “bladder rack”, harvested off the Argyll Coast. And presumably it’s organic, rather than that chemical shit that McDonald’s try to sell you.
Why They Failed and Why We Want to Puke in the Ocean: In a word: Blech! Aside from naming the beer after a children’s myth that has undoubtedly traumatized generation of kids, we cannot conceive of the appeal of advertising the fact that a beer is brewed using the stuff that you need to wash off your boat with a high-powered hose every time you take it in for the season. Seaweed, for all its purported ecological benefit, is one of nature’s more repulsive creations, and there’s no reason Zebra Mussel Barnacle Stout or Man-o-war Jellyfish Wheat won’t be joining Kelpie Organic in the brewery’s seasonal gift basket. As a kid, there were few things as fun to at the beach as getting a handful of the stuff and chucking it at the bald head of your favorite hectoring uncle, but drink it? No thanks Bucko, we’ll keep to the dry land.
British Navy Pusser’s Rum
From England comes a brand of rum that takes you back to the days when the British Navy were earning their reputation for being adept at nothing other than “rum, sodomy, and the lash”. This rum celebrates the rum part of that naval “to-do” list.
What the Company Might Have Intended: Members of the British navy, back when they were out sailing into mysterious foreign ports to bayonet the locals and open post offices, were kept from mutiny largely by a daily allotment – a “tot” – of rum. Sure there was the scurvy, the filthy living conditions and, if you were the cabin boy, the constant fear of being raped and/or eaten, but none of that would seem as terrible if you were out of your gourd on rum at the time. What’s more, the daily pint of rum also helped contribute to turning sailors’ skin cirrhosis-of-the-liver yellow, which made for a pleasant effect in combination with the sun shining off their faces as they were tipped into the ocean during at-sea burials. On the ships of old, the daily tot of rum was doled out by a purser and “pusser” is how you pronounce “purser” after you’ve had your daily tot. The practice of giving sailors a pint of rum a day was discontinued in 1970 – or perhaps the stress there should be it actually went on until 1970 – and British Navy Pusser’s Rum then is an attempt to carry on in that manly tradition of iron boats and hard men with even harder livers.
Why They Failed and Why, Yo-ho-ho, A Pirate’s Life is Not For Us: Another contender for this list was Sailor Jerry Spiced Navy Rum, but Pusser’s won out because nobody without an encyclopedia of tedious naval trivia at their side – or Google – would guess that Pusser’s is a derivation of Purser. Not only does it call to mind unpleasant images of Sheriff Buford Pusser kicking a Texas drunk to death, but it also sounds like the kind of wound you would not want to get while on board one of those hygienically-defunct ships of yore.
Entire Butt Porter
From the UK comes this porter that gives you a retort to have at the ready the next time someone tells you your favorite malt liquor “tastes like ass”. This stuff is called Entire Butt Porter and by all accounts it tastes pretty damn good.
What the Company Might Have Intended: What initially appears to be an entreaty not to give preference to one cheek over the other, but rather to embrace the “entire butt” – commendable as that might have been – actually seems to be one of those quirks of American versus UK English (like how in the US they call that thing that soccer moms carry their mace in a fanny pack, whereas in the UK it’s presumably known as a vagina mace-carrier). Butt, it turns out, is an old English term for barrel, so “entire butt” means “the entire barrel”, and has nothing whatever to do with asses.
Why They Failed and Why We Won’t Be Saying “Bottoms-up!” with this stuff: All meaning-of-word nonsense aside, there’s no getting around the fact that this is ass beer. If you order this one, you’ll be left to the mercies of your howling friends who can inquire quite justifiably, “Tell me, just how does ASS taste?” This also goes for Butcombe Bitter, all of the beers put out by Butts Brewery (particularly our favorite “Le Butts Biere”) and, of course, king of the ass beers, AASS Bock out of Belgium.
CLICK HERE FOR PART TWO OF THE WORLD’S WORST-SOUNDING BOOZE BRAND NAMES!
August 4th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
I have to say, as a Georgia resident (and drinker) that the Sweetwater brews are excellent, particularly the Summer Hummer. Their best is the 420 though, it’s actually one of my favorite beers.
October 29th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Despite the names I now find myself thirsty.