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Beer history marketing

‘Saucy’ Beer Names

Saucy beer names — Dirty Tackle, Piddle Slasher, Old Slapper — are a bit of fun to some, off-putting to others, and either way are another battleground for debates over ‘political correctness’, censorship, good taste and sexism.

We’ve been keeping notes for years, now, trying to work out how they came to be so common in British brewing in particular.

(Though America also has them (Old Leghumper) as does Belgium (Mad Bitch) and they also seem to crop up elsewhere on occasion.)

To have saucy beer names, you need to have beer names — that is, other than in this format:

The 1966 Brewery Manual contains a reference list of trademarked brand names. It’s not comprehensive, Ron Pattinson tells us, but it’s still a good starting point: of the 650 or so provided none are outright filthy and only about ten provide anything for a bar-room wag to get a snigger out of with enough mugging and winking, e.g. Big Horn, Cock o’ the North, ‘I’ll take a Mild Maid please!’ (And it had apparently not even occurred to anyone that there was fun to be had with ‘Blonde’ — no beers are listed.)

Categories
Blogging and writing

Winter edition of CAMRA's BEER magazine

The latest edition of CAMRA’s excellent BEER magazine is available online for members. We’ve got a little piece in it in which we go head to head with The Reluctant Scooper on the subject of smutty pumpclips.

We argue that they’re rubbish.

(There, that’ll save you wading through our whole argument.)

If you’ve read the article and want to argue or agree with us, the comments below are a good place to do it. We’re also on Twitter @boakandbailey.