expectedwrong hindsight

///fear.movie.lions

Stone Brewing named an IPA after a what3words address, which is either the most inspired beer name in years or a sign that we've fully run out of words that aren't owned by someone.

1 min read 192 words #beer #what3words #branding #stone-brewing #location-tech
hindsight — doesn't matter anymore

beer review. not a prediction.

Stone Brewing has a new IPA. It's named after a three-meter-by-three-meter patch of earth.

what3words — the location system that cut the entire surface of the planet into 57 trillion squares and gave each one a random three-word address — apparently makes for good beer naming. ///fear.movie.lions is the address. Also now a nationwide IPA.

There's something honest about this. Beer names have been nonsense for decades — aggressive alliteration, punny mascots, fake-rugged imagery — and at least ///fear.movie.lions is nonsense with a coordinate attached. You can go there. You can stand in that three-meter square and drink this beer, which is either the most romantic thing a beer has ever offered you or a deeply weird version of a tourist trap.

The three words themselves do real work without trying: fear, movie, lions. That's a better tagline than most marketing teams produce on purpose. The algorithm didn't care. The algorithm was just counting squares.

Stone makes good IPAs. This one is apparently no exception — which almost makes the whole thing feel like a dare. Name the beer after coordinates and then make it good enough that nobody cares.

They won.