Assigned Ale At Birth

REBLOG if you would hunt rats with him.

Sadly, Gozer passed away last year due to feline leukemia. However, the other three - Venkman, Egon and Raymond - are all still around and active!

Venkman is the “leader” of the group, and by far the most curious - he explores and investigates everyone and everything that comes through the brewery. He also has a great sense of when somebody’s taking a picture of him and poses accordingly. He’s not interested in having humans pet him and will run away from you.

Raymond, however, seems to have been feral for all of thirty seconds before Treehouse picked him up: He will meow for attention, and either rub up against your hand to demand pets, or flop down on the ground so you can scratch his belly. He and Venkman are close pals.

Egon is the most skittish of the bunch, and barely likes you to even look at him. He’ll investigate new things, but spends most of his time hiding and sleeping. He has a special hiding spot on top of a pipe, and he somehow has the uncanny ability to sleep with all four paws dangling completely off of it without ever falling of.

This is how they spend most of their day. If you ever find a stray cat hair on one of your six-packs, it’s probably Raymond’s. The guy sheds like mad.

Venkman’s curiosity occasionally gets the better of him. This is what happened when a new pump came into the brewery. He managed to escape handily enough, though.

Like I said, Venkman likes to pose.

Buddies. <3

With over 4,000 craft breweries in the United States alone, people are having trouble finding unique names for their beers. That’s a problem, because when two breweries accidentally use the same name, it results in potential confusion at best and at worst, a legal battle. Litigation over craft beer trademarks is noticeably on the rise.

I decided to find out whether a neural network can help.

A neural network is a type of computer program that, among its many talents, can learn to imitate datasets just by looking at enough examples. I’ve used them to name kittens, metal bands, Pokemon, paint colors, and more.

I knew I wanted to train the neural network separately for different kinds of beers. Different categories of beers have their own distinct naming conventions; in theory, you should roughly be able to tell a stout from an IPA from a double IPA by the name alone. 

Ryan Mandelbaum of Gizmodo sparked this project by putting me in touch with Andy Haraldson, who very generously provided me with a huge dataset of hundreds of thousands of beer names that he extracted from BeerAdvocate.com. There were over 90 types of beer in the full dataset (for example, black ales, belgian dark ales, euro dark lagers, schwarzbier, dark wheat ales, and english mild dark ales). To make the task manageable (and to combine a few datasets that only had a few hundred unique names) Eva Gulotty sorted them into broader groups. And then I set the neural network to work on each category.

It worked. The neural network produced unique names that were plausible, or weirdly awesome, or so outlandish that they sounded like the sort of beer you could only buy after a multi-day scavenger hunt involving hang gliding, codebreaking, and Fairbanks, Alaska.

I give you: craft beer names, invented by neural network.

IPAs

Dang River Earth Dock IPA Yamquak Bigly Bomb Session IPA Binglezard Flack Jain Is The Dog Earth 2 Sanebus Tower Of Ergelon Toe Deal Juicy Dripple IPA Flying Rocks IPA Yall In Wool Earth Pump Heaven Cat Heart Compost Wicked Geee Text 5 Of The IPA Cockamarin Hard IPA Test Tha IPA Yampy Widee Banger Fripper IPA Oarahe Momnila Day Revenge Bass Cornationn Yerve Of Aterid Ale

Strong Pale Ales (Doubles, Triples, etc)

The Great Rebelgion Trippel Lock Thick Back The Fraggerbar Dankering Third Maus Sip’s The Stunks Belgian Tripel Slambertangeriss Third Danger Track Of The Wind Devil’s Chard Spore Of Gold The Actoompe Brother Panty Tripel The Oldumbrett’s Ring The Vunker The Finger Gunder Of Traz Cherry Boof Cornester Strange Fast Drammnt Humple La Bobstore Barrel Aged Thrennt Rem Wine Barrel Aged Monkay Tripel

Amber Ales

Snarging Red Warmel Halce’s Comput Ale Fire Pipe Blangelfest Stoodemfest La Cat Tas Oo Ma Ale Ole Blood Whisk Frog Trail Ale Ricias Donkey Brain Sacky Rover Gate Rooster Cramberhand O'Busty Irish Red Helusto’s Humpin’ Red The Hunty Rickin Organic Red Deaath River Smush Hoppy Amber Ale Rivernillion Amber Special North Wish Leifstic Imperial Red Ambre O Woo’s Omella Imperial Red Ale

Stouts

I The Moon The Bopberry Stout Cherry Coconut Mint Chocolate Stout Black Morning Sir Coffee Shock State Take Bean Single Horde Whata Stout Shany Lace Black Sink Stout Barrel Aged Chocolate Milksmoke Shump Morning Dave - Vanilla Coffee Stout Avidberry Dark Thomblan Jrankers Java Stout Spulgican’s Chocolate Coconut Pamper Cherry Trout Stout Bold Oot Stout Pimperdiginistic The Blacksmith W/ Cherry Stout

Want more beer names? Want worse beer names? I had so many names that I couldn’t fit them all in this post. Sign up here and I’ll email you a pdf of about 100 more beer names. For these names I turned the neural network’s creativity variable higher and got results that can be described mainly as … interesting. And of course, there’s the inevitable beer named Fart. (It’s a stout. Of course it’s a stout.) 

One year ago yesterday, I finished the process of legally changing my name, and began living life openly as a woman.

How has it only been a year? It feels like a lifetime ago that I had to wrestle with the gender I’d been forced to live as for so long; even the days when I knew myself as Julia but had to keep that fact secret seem impossibly distant now. I feel so much more myself than I ever did before, and I can’t even imagine living as that old self again. Transition is still strange and exciting in many ways, but I feel like I’ve grown into it like I could never grow into my old skin.

Thanks and love to all of you for your support, and for helping me be all the Julia I can be.

“Initially, brewing was carried out as home brewing by women for domestic use only. It was part of the daily housework next to cooking and baking bread.” (Handbook of Brewing, Priest and Stewart, 2006)

“Traditionally, [African] beers are made by women brewsters, as was the case medieval Europe, and they may be consumed with some ceremony.” (Brewing, Briggs, Brookes, and Stevens, 2003)

And here are some articles:

A (Very) Brief History of Women in Beer

http://growlermag.com/women-in-beer/

It seems that, much like computer science and programming, brewing was originally a woman’s trade, and the innovations and development of brewing were primarily accomplished by women for a long time. Until, men found a reason to take interest (money), then railroaded women out of the culture. 

The place of women in beer and brewing culture these days is still pretty precarious: Women brewers are regarded as curiosities and exceptions, beer advertising is still grievously misogynist, and beer enthusiast culture is overwhelmingly male-dominated and female-exclusionary. Queer and trans people may as well not exist within it at all. Most other women I know in the industry are sick to fucking death of talking about being women in the brewing industry, instead of talking about their actual beer. This isn’t any better in the craft brewing world than it is in macro beer culture, and is worse in some respects. Have you seen the labels on blonde ales these days? Or some of the even grosser labels?

“I don’t need to have intense, unbearable gender dysphoria in order to be trans. I just need to prefer living as a woman over living as a man. Being uncomfortable in my body isn’t a requirement. Being more comfortable as a woman is all it takes.” - Zinnia Jones

One of the biggest struggles I’ve had with my transition since coming out as transgender is reconciling my own story with those of other trans people, and with the narratives that are constantly spouted at us. Most of the stories you hear are about people who’ve Known Since They Were Four and experience extreme body and social dysphoria, and need to transition to escape that pain.

I don’t remember ever really feeling that way. I never had a sense of transness as a child, or as a teenager, or even as an adult until my 30s. I don’t recall hating my body or my genitals when I was younger. I mostly remember being told I’m a boy and feeling a gigantic “meh” about it. People seem to expect that every trans person experiences a voice in their head screaming “YOU ARE NOT THE GENDER YOU WERE ASSIGNED”, but I don’t remember hearing that voice as a child or a teenager. But neither did I feel any connection to masculinity, other than a sense of resignation that, “This is what people say I am, so I guess that’s what I should be.” I got pretty good at performing it; after a while, I started liking how people reacted to me as a masculine person, so I figured that meant masculinity was okay for me after all. I was still a “weird guy” who didn’t quite connect with most men or masculine-coded things, but I figured I was just an eccentric dude in general.

When I started meeting other trans people, I was fascinated by their stories but couldn’t internalize them as something that applied to me. After all, I seemed to be okay with my body and my social role, even if not especially happy with them. Many of my transgender friends reported being unable to function or to care about themselves unless they went through with transition, but I seemed to be functional and healthy as a man. Still, I found an affinity with trans people that grew as time went on, and I grew more and more disconnected from my masculinity the more that I learned about transness.

What made me recognize myself - first as genderqueer and then as transfeminine - was not internal dysphoria, but envy - of wanting to be something else. I saw a woman at a concert and felt intensely jealous of her for everything she was able to be that I felt I was not: Beautiful, vibrant, comfortable, free. I recognized that there were things I wanted that living as a man couldn’t give me, and that I had the right and ability to change that if I wanted to. I didn’t transition to escape gender dysphoria - I transitioned to pursue gender euphoria.

My girlfriend came up with a perfect analogy: “It’s like living in a city filled with smog all your life, then breathing fresh air for the first time.” You can live in the smog, sure, and you can live a reasonably comfortable existence there. But you won’t thrive. You won’t grow. You won’t live. I probably could have lived the rest of my life as my old self and been okay. But living as Julia makes me infinitely happier. My friends and coworkers say that I’m less anxious, that I have a twinkle in my eye that wasn’t there before, that I’m vibrant. Going from “meh” to “YES” made an enormous difference in my life. For me, it was the difference between passive acceptance and affirmative consent. And who knows? Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to live in the smog forever. Maybe this was heading off terrible and destructive things that would have come later, had I not transitioned when I did.

The argument could be made that what I experienced was, in fact, a form of dysphoria; that my lifelong ambivalence and disconnection with masculinity was dysphoria from the beginning. And that’s probably not far off from the truth! But because my form of dysphoria doesn’t match up with the Clear-Cut Acceptable Trans Narrative, it’s been used to debate and negate my transness and the necessity of my transition. And frankly, considering how overwhelmingly positive transition has been for me, that’s absolute nonsense. We allow people to go through all sorts of other massive, life-upending changes to improve themselves and their circumstances without half the consternation associated with gender transition: career changes, moving to a different city or country, starting or ending relationships, having children, starting a business, the list goes on and on. If transition can hold the same benefits and potential for happiness as any of these changes, without causing harm to anybody, why is it so much more maligned and strictly guarded and stigmatized?