Vote on name for Daily Herald beer

Published 2:25 pm Friday, November 7, 2014

Reporters and beer go way back.

There’s the regular beer-after-deadline that many reporters have enjoyed after the paper’s been put to bed or the countless interviews over a cold pint. New Cubs manager Joe Maddon knew where his bread was buttered and offered reporters a “shot and a beer” during his first press conference. There’s even a National Buy Reporters a Beer Day (my favorite holiday).

The Daily Herald is taking advantage of that fact, joining with a local brewery to brew a beer that will have a customized Herald label and a fun newspaper-centric name — like Reporter Red Ale from Dicks Brewing and The Chronicle in Centralia (see photo).

Our newsroom was tasked with coming up with names for the beer and we joyfully came up with more than 50 possibilities. That list was pared down to five, which were voted on Friday. Here’s at look at the final five:

Ale the News That Fits

A long-time newsroom quip. The New York Time’s slogan is: “All the news that’s fit to print.” The reality, we joke, is that most newspapers print “all the news that fits.”

Extra! Extra!

A newsboy’s cry. This was nominated in a number of forms: Extra! Extra! Strong … Extra! Extra! Bitter … Extra! Extra Stout. It may depend on what the bottle is filled with.

Heraldeweizen

A play on words for the German word for wheat beer, Hefeweizen. And, yes, Scuttlebutt does produce a Hefeweizen and (perhaps better for Christmas) a Weisenbock.

Muckraker

One of those colorful, crazy names craft brewers seem to favor — but it is a term popularized by Teddy Roosevelt and subsequently applied to investigative reporters.

Herald’s Daily Draft

A draft is a type of unbottled beer of course — but a publisher of The Washington Post, Philip Graham, famously said that journalism “is the first rough draft of history.”

Which one would you vote for (of course, this isn’t binding)?