Last week, Ezra Johnson-Greenough wrote about Portland's newest brewery: Second Profession. I hope it will become another beloved treasure here in Beervana, but man that is a terrible name. It's forgettable. It's boring. It is in no way remotely descriptive, except to the person who chose the name. It will kindle a flicker of emotion in precisely zero people. If Second Profession does become a beloved institution, it will be in spite of the name, not because of it.

Bad names are far, far too common. Weird, off-putting, obscure, or random names seem to be the norm more than the exception. And it seems to be getting worse. I don't remember thinking this was a pervasive problem twenty years ago. A cursory look through some of my older books and ephemera (OBF programs) would seem to confirm it.

As with everything in society, there are fashions in names. In earlier ages, when literacy wasn't guaranteed, company names often referred to simple nouns that had a distinctive logo, things like Black Cat, Crown, or Red Rose. In the 19th century, founders named their brewery after themselves: Miller, Pabst, Weinhard. When new breweries started opening in the 1970s and '80s, they often suggested a place: Sierra Nevada, Deschutes, New Glarus, Brooklyn. This was useful in establishing that sense localness so central to the craft brewing ethos. It was also common to use evocative, nonspecific place names that could be traced back to a brewery, like Boulevard, Long Trail, Shipyard, and Full Sail.

Somewhere about the mid-aughts, though, names started to get abstract. I've never been able to isolate a cause, but it's far too common to be coincidence. Here in Oregon, we had the strange interest in -tion names: Coalition, Migration, Culmination. As in the case of Second Profession, one vein of bad names point back to the founder in an oblique way; consider Plan B in Ontario (amazingly not the only Canadian Plan B) or Last Name. And then there are the just obscure: Counterbalance, Upright (sorry, Alex, you know I think you have one of the best breweries in the country!), or Burial. Whereas 19th century names were concrete to the point of simplicity, many of these names are far too oblique to understand without hearing the backstory.

I get it; names are hard. There are 5,500+ breweries in the US alone. Add to that beer names and you're getting up there. A lot of the good and obvious ones have either been taken or are close enough to trademarked names to get you in trouble. I've spoken with brewers who've said the trademark search is frustrating because it seems like everything they come up with is unavailable. But come on, breweries of America--we can do better.

A brewery name guarantees neither success or failure, but can easily put a heavy thumb on the scale one way or another. And in a world with so many breweries, it becomes even more important because finding something memorable is critical to distinguishing one's brewery. A name gives you a chance to create an emotional bridge to your customers, to communicate something salient about your brewery, to guide branding and design, to stand out in a crowd. Or, if you botch it, to fade into the background and send the inadvertent message of "mediocrity." Again, good breweries can overcome bad names and overbranded breweries can collapse because they didn't care about beer, but a bad name is an unforced error.

For my money, bad brewery names come in one of three flavors: