What’s On Tap: Wisconsin Brewing Company honors badass birds with traditional brews

When it comes to making Sconnie beers, brewmaster Kirby Nelson ‘fucking means it’ with brewskies like Old Abe-inspired IPA Yankee Buzzard

April 23, 2015

Wisconsin Brewing Company’s Yankee Buzzard

A beer’s name and label can either harm or help a brewery, and the results are regularly polar. It’s not often you think of a name or label as “eh” because even “eh” is bad compared to the imagination out there.

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For example Crowdsourced MobCraft brewery depends on collaboration for catchy titles, whereas St. Francis Brewery in St. Francis, Wisconsin names each brew after one of the seven deadly sins.

In this competitive craft beer climate, a traditional brewery can have a tough time making an impact with their beer branding.

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And in terms of Wisconsin, you can’t get much more traditional than the Wisconsin Brewing Company. To start, no catchy, topical labels don their beers; they assign each brew a simple number before they name it. Each beer goes through trials until brewmaster Kirby Nelson gives it his approval, after which they begin ramping up excitement for their new brew. This is odd compared to other breweries who wait to announce a new beer until the name and label are decided on.

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In addition to the traditional, simple and Sconnie naming, Nelson made sure to tell me a German engineer in Wisconsin built their brew house, the kegs and hops come from Wisconsin and nearly everything at WBC is connected to the wonderful state of Wisconsin.

“When we say Wisconsin Brewing Company, we fucking mean it,” Nelson said.

But after originally labeling their beers with just their name (Wisconsin Brewing Company) and style (IPA, Pale Ale, Stout), WBC recently decided to do things differently.

They decided to name and design each brew with a specific and unique story, more often than not richly rooted in Wisconsin. Take for instance their Chocolate Lab label. What better dog to symbolize Wisconsin?

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Though they embrace evolving their brand a bit, WBC aims to keep theirs short and packed with Wisconsin heritage.

“It’s getting tougher to break out,” Nelson said. “Good god, beers are coming out faster and faster and are getting longer descriptions.”

According to him, the problem with producing a new brew is finding a fresh, relatable, unique name.

“Someone is always using the term. It makes you dig deeper for cool,” Nelson said, still noting that beer naming is becoming more interesting as time goes on.

He chuckled while telling stories of breweries clashing over names.

“While there is certainly great new beer getting brewed, people need to know what brewery is producing it.”

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WBC connects all the dots with a label that has you asking, “What’s all this about?” and getting an answer that is memorable and only relatable to WBC.

Appropriately, for this week’s column I poured a glass of Yankee Buzzard, but before I dive into my tasting notes, I wouldn’t do this column justice without sharing the story behind the name and label.

Old Abe is the name of the bald eagle that was part of the Eighth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. He was a rallying point for the troops and a reminder of what they fought for. However, for the Confederate soldiers, they called him “Yankee Buzzard” because he would screech at all them. Heck, the Confederates even set bounties on him to no prevail; they merely added to the buzzing with bullets.