The new-look Boatrocker range

Brewers tweaking their branding in favour of simplicity and clarity has been a recurring theme in recent weeks.

Boatrocker Brewing Co today announced the retirement of the Big Love name associated with its Pale Ale, in a bid to bring more consistency to its range.

The beer will now be known simply as Pale Ale, which Boatrocker’s Matt Houghton said was in response to feedback that the Big Love moniker was confusing for consumers.

“It’s important for us that Boatrocker’s beers are recognised as a unit and that they all work well together. We thought about how best to achieve that for a long time, and it became clear that the Pale Ale works best when lined up with our other core beers,” he said.

Targeting brandawareness
The move follows comments by Deschutes Brewery’s Andrew Tysler, that the US company had undergone a rebrand to bring its company name to the fore.

“Everybody thought it was the Mirror Pond Brewery or the Black Butte Brewery. They didn’t think it was the Deschutes Brewery,” he told the Australian Craft Brewers Conference, in reference to Deschutes’ Pale Ale and Porter sub-brands.

“Why? Because our name wasn’t prominent on the label.

“What we did, is we changed these labels to have Deschutes as being a prominent name and then the brand and the style be secondary,” he said.

Tysler said another of America’s top breweries, New Belgium, also suffers from one of its beers having a larger identity than the brewery itself.

“They all think it’s the Fat Tire Brewery. It’s New Belgium Brewery,” he said.

Research had shown that millennial consumers “want you to tell them what the style of beer is”, added Tysler.

Also in recent weeks, Clare Valley Brewing Co unveiled new branding that does away with the individual characters previously associated with each of its beers.

Pale Ale recipe unchanged: Boatrocker
As well as the new identity for Pale Ale, Boatrocker has relabelled its core range of beers, Houghton said.

“We’re still growing, and because of that we are always willing to revisit something if it’s not fitting right. Simply being able to present it as the Boatrocker Pale Ale is a much better fit for us, because it strips it back to what it is. It’s all about the beer that’s in the glass,” he said.

Boatrocker Pale Ale has not changed in recipe, with a hop bill comprising Cascade, Victoria’s Secret, Ella and Galaxy creating, in the brewer’s words, “a full bodied 4.4 percent pale ale bursting with stone fruit and tropical aromas”.