By Scott Stewart - Mar 10, 2022
McAllister Brewing Company (North Wales, PA) has created a new delicious farmhouse ale series called Never Nude!
How the Never Nude name came to be.
Something we take pride in at McAllister's is the fact that we only use the bare essentials when making beer. So much complexity can be accomplished with just the right grain bill, water temperature, hop combination, and yeast pairing. In some cases, extra flavoring is added to enhance the beer, but something is lost when you add too much.
When starting the Never Nude Series, I had the idea in my head of taking a base and using wild yeast that I harvested myself. I wanted to let the yeast determine how the beer would finish. The description on the bottle says it all. “Staying as naked as possible was the goal. Barley, Hops, Water, and a McAllister Wild Yeast Strain are the only ingredients. No artificial flavor, No added sugar, and No tricks. Made with the genuine desire and love for making beer.”
I knew what I wanted the beer to be but the big question still remained: What to name it? In my mind, when you strip something down to its basics, it’s technically naked. I was having trouble using the word "naked” in this case though. I truly didn’t feel that the beer could be described as fully naked because even though we did “make” the beer, and find our own yeast, we didn’t malt our own grains. So, the work to make the beer wasn’t completely stripped down to the basics, and therefore, it wasn’t truly naked. If you’re confused by my line of thinking, drink some more and it will all make sense. As that thought plagued me, I was also struggling with how to add a little bit of a comedic flair to the name.
Day after day passed and I was still looking high and low for an answer. Then one hot summer day I found myself mowing the lawn in a pair of old jeans that I should have thrown away years ago. I thought to myself, well I could at least make the jeans into shorts and get some more life out of them. That was the light bulb moment. Instantly the show “Arrested Development” popped into my head. One of the characters, Tobias, is what’s called a Never Nude. He is truly never-nude because he is always wearing a pair of jean shorts, aka Jorts, under his regular clothes. He even wears the jorts in the shower and to the beach. The concept was perfect. Finally, I had a beer name that fit the beer profile and had the right amount of humor.
Thus, the beer Never Nude was born.
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