Upstart Georgetown brewery owners Steve and Greg Ward were left high and dry today when they learned that all clever hop-based IPA puns had officially been tapped.
“We already had labels and stickers made with a Hoptimus Prime logo before realizing the name had been claimed by a Pennsylvania brewery in 2006,” said Steve Ward, consoling his distraught brother.
Not even their dads could reap any original hop-related puns, leaving their flagship beer still nameless.
Industry experts began to predict such a catastrophic beer naming event as early as 2010 when the explosion of microbreweries and IPAs outgrew the finite number of clever puns available.
“We thought we had another five to 10 years of hop-related puns before we really needed to worry, but as the Ward Brothers proved this week, the linguistic community has made a terrible mistake,” said University of Puget Sound linguistics researcher Dr. Lance McCormick.
The long-term effects of this etymological nightmare remain to be seen, but the impact is already hitting Seattle hard. At press time, the Wards were feverishly digging through what’s left of noun-ampersand-noun brand names.
