Long live That Brewery and Fermentarium!
Nectar of the doGs is now no more...
Back in 1988, my brother Noel and I started our adventures in home-brewing together during university in Toronto. The Nectar of the doGs name was born from a self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek, "dog piss" metaphor. Originally our labels had "self-portraits" of the two of us: Noel represented by Where's Waldo, and myself by Henry the VIIIth.
After a number of years and several moves each, we wound up brewing seperately in different locations. Throughout the years I kept brewing under our original moniker and at some point added the fire hydrant to the logo (occasionally with an accompanying yellow puddle) and sometimes an added dog food dish radiating celestial light à la the holy grail.
That all being said, thirty years later, having now brewed in Toronto, Dublin, Pennsylvania, Vancouver, Keat's Island, and (finally) Penticton, I've been told several times during this past anniversary year that it's perhaps time to leave the "immature" and "juvenile" imagery behind and re-brand. Several suggestions of pursuing contract-/gypsy-brewing have really got my brain turning over. What if? [What if I had any money for a start-up??] What would have me stand out as "that" brewery, yet retain the playful, come what may, attitude?
Announcing:
Not to be confused with That Brewery in Arizona, please (it is another country, after all!), but rather riffing on the new Another Beer Company in New Westminster BC.
A brief(ish) note regarding the new logo...
A penchant for manuscripts, etymologies, and scripts, fostered by my degree in Celtic Studies, led me down the rabbit hole of manuscript contractions. The English alphabet used to contain several letters that we no longer recognize today. One of those is the letter þ "thorn", representing the "th" sound in today's "thin" and "thing", as opposed to the letter ð "eth" as in "that" and "there"—an unvoiced fricative versus a voiced (and inter-dental) fricative!
Irish minuscule scribes of the Middle Ages used all means possible to save vellum [and costs], keeping letter-size very small, crowding words together and ignoring rules for syllable-division between lines.
The insular scribes made use of some of the special characters of their own, some of which were taken over from the Germanic runes, such as þ ‘thorn’ and æ ‘ash’ as well as ð ‘eth’, which was invented by Irish monks. These characters were introduced to represent sounds in Germanic languages which were not present in the Latin script, but they also had their abbreviative uses such as the practice of using a strike-through thorn for ‘that’... 1
Thus, dropping the "a" in "that" and conflating the þ and "t", gave us the slashed- or crossed-thorn. And our logo.
Thus, this: that. Or, rather, 
