There has been much discussion in the growing literature on craft beer about neolocalism. Usually that fancy term ‘neolocal’ means the homage paid to the inclusion of local ingredients such as locally produced hops or grains used in the products of microbreweries that have a geographically limited distribution range. Used in this sense, neolocal is similar to the French term terroir usually associated with the production of wine from a geographically restricted region. The origin or terroir of many estate-bottled wines is legally controlled and protected.

A second form of neolocalism is the naming of the brewery products or the brewery after local features of the environment or aspects of local history. Great Lakes Brewery of Cleveland, OH, for example, markets Edmund Fitzgerald Porter named after the ship in the well-known Gordon Lightfoot song that sank in the Great Lakes. There are literally hundreds of such local references in the names of beers and breweries. Some are quite obvious; others are almost like ‘in-jokes’ that only locals would understand.

A third form of neolocalism may be less obvious—the graphic design of beer labels developed by local artists. The examples I discuss here are brewed by the Unita Brewing Company in Salt Lake City, Utah, itself named for a local geographic feature—the Unita Basin. My daughter Leia Bell is a graphic artist based in Salt Lake City perhaps best known for her ‘gig posters’—silk-screened posters advertising bands playing shows at one of the several music venues in the city. She, along with several other well-known local “underground” artists, was approached to design labels for several of Unita Brewing Company’s products. The names of the various brews were already chosen by the company. But, the local artists were given free rein to come up with their own designs. The only caveat was that the brewery wanted some human element shown on each label. With that rather loose constraint, Leia went about coming up with several designs. Since the name of the Baltic Porter was going to be Sea Legs, she worked with several types of “legs” including the tentacles of a giant octopus reminiscent of something out of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and also several mermaid – themed designs thus stretching the definition of “legs” to include fins and scales as shown in the two attached rough sketches of the designs (Figures 1 and 2). Her final design is shown in the third image of all three of her graphic designs that were chosen by Unita (Figure 3). So, even if the names of some of the products do not evoke local geographic features, neolocalism of a sort can still exist because local artists were used to design the product labels.

This blog entry was written by guest blogger. Thomas L. Bell. Tom is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Tennessee. He currently lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky where is an Adjunct Professor of Geography at Western Kentucky University. He is co-editor of FOCUS in Geography, a scholarly journal published by the American Geographical Society. Tom’s research interest are in marketing geography and location theory. More recently he has done some work on the American craft brewing industry in the southeastern United States and also on home brewing. To view more artwork by Leia Bell please visit her website at https://www.etsy.com/people/goprintgo.