What is a “bum steer,” and why does Mode have one? Who is the “Eugene” of “Eugene’s Record Co-op”? How did a local winery come to christen its most famous product “Sex”? The Ticker was curious too, so we dug into some of the area’s most unique brand names to learn how they came to be.

“People don't tell you this when you start a business, but you go through a lot of really terrible names,” says Nicholas Lefebre, founder and CEO of the Elk Rapids-based distillery Ethanology. “It’s challenging, because naming your business really represents everything that you're about.”

Lefebre and his wife, head distiller Geri, eventually settled on “Ethanology,” which Lefebre defines as “the science and art of distillation.” The name’s linguistic and scientific ties also helped the pair establish a naming scheme for their individual products, all of which are grounded in Latin. “Mel,” the Latin word for honey, is the name for Ethanology’s honey distillate, while the company’s wheat vodka, white whiskey, and wild forage gin are named “Siligo,” “Frumentum,” and “Eros,” respectively – Latin words that mean “wheat,” “grain,” and “wild.”

Brent Faber, who opened a craft brewery in Acme last month called Stone Hound Brewing Company, echoes Lefebre’s comments about the difficulty of naming a business. The process, he says, is doubly challenging in craft beer, where seemingly every possible name is already taken.

“I had these big lists [of potential names],” Faber says. “I’d wake up at three in the morning and think, ‘Oh, I’ve got it!’ and then punch [a new idea] into my phone, only to find out that was already the name of a brewery in Kenosha or San Diego or something.”

Faber cycled through “a couple hundred” names before choosing “Stone Hound,” inspired by a uniquely northern Michigan hobby: collecting Petoskey stones. Fittingly, Faber’s entire Petoskey stone collection is now part of the brewery’s 28-foot-long epoxy river bar top.

Other local business names range from tongue-in-cheek jokes to heartfelt tributes. Mode’s Bum Steer falls into the former category: Skylar Mode, whose parents Anita and Bob established the restaurant in 1975, says the name is both a pun (“steer” winks at the restaurant’s steakhouse roots) and a play on the old-school slang saying “bum steer,” which means “a piece of false information or guidance.”

“They just thought it was funny,” Mode says of her parents and the name. “Their motto would be, back in the day, that ‘We won’t give you a bum steer.’ Meaning, you’re going to have a good experience.”

A fun, lighthearted name was also what Jennifer and Mark Davies were after when they opened a deli as part of their business, Peninsula Grill, 18 years ago. As self-described “dog people (cats too),” the restaurateurs wanted a name that honored their pets. The name was almost “Cat Dog Deli,” before the Davies landed on “Bad Dog Deli” instead.

Eugene’s Record Co-op, the downtown Traverse City vinyl record store that operates in the venue room of Studio Anatomy, fits into the “tribute” category. Brian Chamberlain, who owns both Studio Anatomy and the record store, says the shop is named after Eugene Rutherford, who helped him get Studio Anatomy off the ground in 2012.

“He’s an older man who I met around that time, who provided support morally and financially to get my business running,” Chamberlain says of Rutherford. “He really believed the concept of having a business in Traverse City to nurture local artists and provide a place for them to write, create, record, and ultimately perform or display their work to the public.”

For the owners of Hexenbelle, a new café in Traverse City’s Warehouse Market, the name of the business was aspirational – a way to “illustrate the type of environment we wanted…something natural, with concoctions, but beautiful as well.” The name “Hexenbelle” is a multilingual hybrid, with “Hexen” the German word for “witch,” and “Belle” meaning “beauty” in French. The name, which the owners translate as “Witch’s Beauty,” gave a mysterious vibe to the business and also paved the way for Hexenbelle’s logo: a hand holding a mystical-looking flower.

While naming a business is a foundational decision, naming individual products is a lower-stakes – and perhaps more fun – endeavor. That’s the case for Katie Otterman, who runs Slabtown Cookie Co. out of her home kitchen. Otterman’s calling card is unique cookie recipes with playful or locally-inspired names. Her favorites include the “Big Deborah,” a “grown up version” of a Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pie, dipped in white and dark chocolate; the “Euchre Night,” a collection of card game snacks in the form of a cookie (it’s a peanut butter chocolate chip cookie dipped in chocolate and topped with pretzels and crushed Great Lakes Potato Chips); and the “Fast Tammy,” a Nutella-filled meringue named after a ski hill at Hickory Hills.

“So much of the fun of it for me is naming [the cookies],” Otterman says. “You can put a local twist on things, or have a little inside joke with your customers. I was an English major, so the wordplay is always so fun for me.”

It’s a similar situation for Joe Short, founder of Short’s Brewing Company in Bellaire. Of the 700-some beers in the Short’s portfolio, Short says many of the names carry special significance to him and his team. Those beer names pay tribute to everything from the town that Short’s calls home (the “Bellaire Brown”) to Joe Short’s iconic moustache (the “Hopstache”).

One beer, “The Magician,” is named in honor of Short’s CEO Scott Newman-Bale. In the early days of the brewery, when the business was struggling financially, Short says Newman-Bale was always his first call when it came to money troubles. Consistently, Newman-Bale would “work his magic” to get the brewery out of a tight financial squeeze. “And that’s why he became ‘The Magician,’ because he was able to do these things that nobody else could, in an almost magical way,” Short says.

Sometimes, product names even take on a life of their own. That’s the case with “Sex,” the popular sparkling rosé made by MAWBY Vineyards and Winery in Suttons Bay. According to Mike Laing, the winery’s “director of MAWBYness,” the wine had previously been named “Dionysus,” after the Greek god of wine, but proved difficult for some customers to pronounce. It was Larry Mawby, the winery’s founder, who floated the idea of turning the name of the wine into a dirty joke.

“Larry said, ‘Well, we could call it Sex,’ and then we would just sell Sex all day,’” Laing recalls. “It was kind of a joke.”

The name was such a joke, in fact, that Mawby didn’t anticipate it would ever clear the federal wine label approval process. When the label and the name did get approved, though, the winery stuck with Sex. It paid off: The wine has since become Mawby’s best-selling product, and jokes about the name have become a core part of the Mawby customer experience.

“There’s a tip jar in our tasting room,” Laing laughs. “If someone makes a bad Sex joke, they’ve got to put in a dollar.”