Brewery Name Changes

Something I have often wondered is why do we keep changing the name of breweries.

A few examples:

  • Framework Brewery to Framework
  • Red Cat Brewing to Red Cat
  • Fourpure to Fourpure Brewing Co.

I could go on…

These have all changed in the last few weeks I think. Last year if i remember right Cloudwater went through a few changes Cloudwater Brew Co, Cloudwater and back. There might have been another variation in there too.

The changes seem a bit arbitrary, some having brewery, brewing or brew co added others having it removed. Is it a Metropolitan thing? Breweries in major cities having these suffixes added, shires breweries having them removed?

I think the truncating of brewer names - only in the UK, different rules seem to apply elsewhere - was as a result of SilkTork’s opposition to using what he called “accountant’s names” and a preference for the name that was in common usage. So, Fuller’s instead of Fuller Smith & Turner plc. Or, even worse, where the company name bore no relation to the commonly used name/branding - for instance Grainstore was actually Davises Brewing Company Limited (or something like that).

Those long names would then pop up in beer names because the brewer part of the name is autofilled. That has since been improved by automatically excluding the parts of the brewer name we wouldn’t want in the beer name & that worked reasonably well.

Then we had the situation where you simply couldn’t find a brewer with a search using the shrtened form - XT and B&T, for instance - so it made sense to add “Brewery” or whatever in those instances.

There are situations where using the shortened form risks confusion with other brewers, often in different countries.

And using the shortened form can often play havoc with the mapping where Google maps uses the longer form and we use the shorter, especially if the short form is somewhat generic, or just the name of the town the brewer is in etc. And we don’t have the option to enter the mapping co-ordinates manually for brewers so it’s often necessary to tinker with the name and address to get it into a form that Google likes, and maps correctly.

So, in general, I’m now in favour of using the longer form (minus Limited, plc or whatever) as long as it doesn’t find it’s way into beer names frequently enough to be an annoyance. I can’t see what harm it does. It would still seem a bit wrong to me to have Fuller Smith & Turner instead of Fuller’s though, just because of the way it looks.

I have long been an advocate for using the longer form of naming Breweries on Ratebeer due to several factors, including mapping and search as highlighted by Chris above, but also with the incremental increase of Brewery openings having some form of separating similar named Breweries. I would say that we have around 10 to 15 new Breweries per quarter just in England and many of these names clash, so I have been using the longer naming format for a while now. I do understand that this can get changed by other Admins at any point.

So it looks like we follow the same practice Glen. Would be interested to know who’s changing them back (and why). Of course, there’s no way to see who made the last edit of a brewer.

I’ve never edited a brewer name to my knowledge.

I do occasionally see a last edit from an overseas admin in a UK beer, where of course you don’t know what edit they have made, but I’ve gone back to make a further change because something didn’t sit right.

@Mr_Pink_1521 Cloudwater have never gone through any name changes it was originally cloudwater brew co and it still is now. Must have been changed on RB mistakenly by a user.
Cheers.