What's In A Name?

We are introducing two new beers at the beer garden this weekend: Son of Mark IPA and Big Deb 1.0. While our tap list on our website and Facebook can tell you about the style and flavor profile of these beers, we'd like to take some time to tell you their stories.

Son of Mark IPA

In the spirit of the hip hop community in the 90's, there are west coast IPAs and there are east coast IPAs (and a bunch of others in between). The trendy east coast IPA is less of a hop bomb than the west coast style and focuses more on big juicy, citrus flavors. Alongside, this beer is often hazy, a result of being unfiltered and unfined (note: fining is the clarification process using non-animal based agents that are vegan-friendly!).

Beers at Second Line often go through a few iterations of names. During production, this IPA was referred to as, “They Call Me Juicy.” We then played around with synonyms of hazy: nebulous, obfuscate... Nothing seemed to fit quite right. But as many things happen around here, the staff was sampling this new IPA and had an “a-ha moment.” Owners, Mark and Karen, have an 8-year old son named Hayes. Hayes sounds like “haze.” Ta-da! We have a name!

Big Deb 1.0 Everyone knows what a Little Debbie oatmeal cookie is. This beer was designed to mimic the flavors of this cookie, but packs a punch with a 9.3% ABV – hence “Big Deb.” As with all beers we produce at Second Line, we strive for continuous improvement. We have some ideas for the next version, so this one got the 1.0 tag with the anticipation of a 2.0 in the future.

Big Deb features oats, molasses, cinnamon and vanilla bean, with a strong emphasis on molasses. We get our molasses from the Old New Orleans Rum Distillery, located on Frenchman Street. This particular molasses is a “B-Cut” variety. The B refers to the B-massecuites, which is a purity classification. If you've been to our beer garden, and more importantly, our bathrooms, you know we like to share “beer vocabulary” with our customers. Today we are going to drop some sugar vocab knowledge on you! “Massecuite” is the suspension of sugar crystals in syrup produced by a sugar factory (Thanks Merriam Webster!).