Magazines » November/December 2009 » What’s in a Name? Ayinger Celebrator
Chances are you haven’t heard of the more than 100-year-old brew Fortunator, but stick a bottle of Celebrator -- the same beer -- on the table, and you know it instantly. The beer’s iconic status is entirely due to Charles Finkel, with help from his wife Rose Ann and beer legend Michael Jackson.
Two years after starting their import company, Merchant du Vin, the Finkels set out on a journey to Germany in search of a doppelbock for U.S. consumers.
“By this time [the best beers] were clearly defined in Michael Jackson’s ‘World Guide to Beer,’ which was my bible,” remembers Finkel. “Pretty much the only German breweries that were exporting their beer to the United States were the huge ones. We made an earlier decision that we would build our company based on relationships with family-owned, independent breweries, not corporations.”
So, in 1980, Finkel and his wife found themselves in the small town of Aying, just south of Munich and out of corporate breweries’ reach. It’s a town so small “you can hardly identify where the center is,” jokes Finkel. “It’s this beautiful little place, a thousand years old, where beer is in the air.”
The center, it turns out, was their hotel, which doubled as a brewpub featuring the town’s own line of brews: Ayinger. The Finkels sat down for dinner, and the beer flowed.
“The beers we drank; every one was a masterpiece,” recalls Finkel. “During the meal we had every beer, including the doppelbock, which was the best one I’d ever tasted. It was called Fortunator.”
So, Finkel’s search for a doppelbock was over almost as soon as it began. The couple met Ayinger’s brewer, Franz Inselkammer, and after a night of pints and a brewery tour, they were convinced Fortunator would be a hit in the States. But there was one problem: the name.
“I said Fortunator was an OK name, but I didn’t think it was that great, and neither was the label,” says Finkel. Like most doppelbocks, the name Fortunator followed the tradition of using the -ator suffix, an homage to the original doppelbock, Paulaner Salvator. Finkel knew he had to follow the custom when renaming Fortunator.
“We came back to Seattle, and it just so happened that Michael Jackson was making one of his regular trips at the time, and he stayed at our house,” says Finkel. “One evening, we got all these samples and Rose Ann, Michael and I spent the evening over a nice dinner, drinking these Ayinger doppelbock beers. It was really funny; I wish I had a recording of these three people coming up with silly names, good names, bad names, and everything else.”
Eventually, Rose Ann landed on Celebrator, as the beer was often opened for celebrations. It stuck, and Charles, also a graphic designer, worked out the now famous label that features two goats (“bock” is German for “goat.”) With a new name and packaging for U.S. import only, the beer became a Stateside hit. A few years after Finkel brought the beer across the Atlantic, he received an unexpected request: Ayinger wanted permission to use his name and packaging for its brand worldwide, officially changing the 100-year-old doppelbock brand to Celebrator.
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This article originally appeared in the November/December 2009 of DRAFT Magazine
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