Do you ever have a feeling that you know is entirely baseless, but you can seem to shake it? Worse yet, you don’t even know why your bias exists? I have this problem, and very specifically with certain beer labels. While shopping for beer, if I see a label with a human or humanoid face or figure on the label, there is a 99.9% chance I pass on buying that beer. The only exceptions to this if I have had the beer before, likely on tap where I can’t see the label, or have had beer from the brewery. I have no problem with (non-anthropomorphised) animals such as Big Sky or Anderson Valley, or scenery with or without animals like Alaskan Brewing, or general bottle art a la many of Pretty Things labels. Some of the best labels come in the most basic form, with simple, well stylised text like that that we get from Modern Times.
One other bias I have, though it is a weaker bias that I can willfully override, is based on brewery or beer names. I tend to prefer names that are descriptive over companies making up names that relate (in no way discernible to the public) to the beer itself. That is a big part of the reason all my home brews get names like ‘Gremlyn’s Mild‘. I think the most adventurous my home brew names get is ‘Sehrdunkelweizen‘, which really is just a descriptive portmanteau in German. I can get over this particular bias if the brewery has a theme and they use things within that theme and slap it in front of the beer style, but only as long as the theme isn’t too tacky.
Like I said, know this is generally irrational and I am possibly missing out on some decent beer because of it, but it is really hard to not feel the pull of brands that look like they took a lot more care in creating their most visible marketing materials. I’d actually like to see some kind of study that looks into beer labels and/or names and see if there are correlations between a brewery’s or beer’s popularity, as a pseudo-measure of quality, and its name or label styling. Someone get on that…