It's my round. What do you fancy? A Parson's Pledge, a Hanky Panky or a Sheepshaggers Gold? Maybe a Dog's Bollocks, a Bumble Hole Bitter, Bashful Beaver or a Wafty Cranker?

You wouldn't be alone if you felt some reluctance to partake. There's sometimes a problem with real ale. It glares at us when we go for a pint. So many of the beer names and pumpclips are hideous.



Not all real ale brewers present their beers in wince-worthy ways. In fact, supportive brewers are frequent commenters on the blog I run with my friend Chris Gittner. On Pumpclip Parade we display aesthetic atrocities from the world of real ale. We hope that our naming and shaming of the perpetrators will persuade guilty parties to improve their presentation. Real ale has an image problem. It reflects on us, the drinkers, and we want something done about it.

We have identified the common characteristics of bad pumpclip design and beer naming: puns, wordplays and spoonerisms; visual puns; objectification of women; wizards, dragons and goblins; alliteration; seaside-postcardism and smut; allusions to intoxication and hangovers; xenophobia; bad graphic design; ugly cartoon artwork; squeezing the word "ale" into places it doesn't belong.

With the exception of the sexism, used judiciously some of these characteristics may be just about acceptable. The trouble is, the guilty brewers can't resist heaping them on top of each other. And some pumpclips are just scarily strange and some are just straightforwardly hideous.

It's a curious phenomenon. Why do a minority of brewers inflict awful images on their beer? Aren't they concerned that potential customers will equate dodgy presentation with dodgy brewing?

When the subject occurs in hardcore real ale internet forums the usual defence for this hideous branding is "it's just a laugh, innit?" Chortling may occur in the brewers' sample rooms, but the humour rarely transfers to pub-goers. The defenders often go on to chastise consumers of mass-produced big-brand beer as "victims of advertising".

Here we have a clue to the roots of wilfully bad beer presentation. I believe the thought process goes something like this: marketing and advertising are responsible for persuading people to drink dull mass-produced beer, therefore if we challenge marketing and advertising by doing it deliberately badly, we emphasise our beer is not mass-market. But it doesn't take a genius to see how this ideology is flawed: while many people would agree the anti-advertising stance is laudable, it makes the product undesirable to many potential customers.

The Campaign for Real Ale must shoulder some of the blame for these woeful brands. For 40 years Camra has been a self-appointed marketing consultancy to the brewers of real ale. But at no time, as far as we can see, has it said to its more recalcitrant clients, "listen chaps, if only you could give your beers attractive names and pumpclips, we'd have an easier time convincing more people to drink real ale."

Bad branding is largely confined to small breweries. Their market share is tiny, and they are breweries that tend to stay tiny. Unfortunately bad images carry further than good images; their bad branding taints the whole sector.