Probably not much like Hoegaarden.

There's a marvellous little microbrewery called Steamworks located in downtown Vancouver.  They brew a good selection of beers including a nice lager, they're in a great location, the food is tasty, and if you sit near the windows on the north side it's a good view provided that you like train tracks. 

A couple of months ago on the way to work, I noticed that a maintenance problem with one of the letters in their neon signage had changed the entire direction of their branding, but when I ran up at lunch to take a picture for the blog, they seemed to have resolved the issue.  It popped up now and then over the next couple of weeks, but I could never reconcile its appearance with the schedule for my morning commute, availability of camera equipment, and lack of pouring down rain, and finally it seemed to go away completely.

When my department had lunch at Steamworks on Friday, I was reminded of the signage thing, and mentioned it to my manager Donovan, because as a longtime player of World of Warcraft, I thought he'd appreciate it.  He found it amusing enough that I decided to fire up Photoshop and redo the Steamworks signage to replicate the problem:

The "orcs with a k" spelling is really more of a Warhammer 40K thing than Warcraft, but I still think that Steam Orks would be a great name for a brewery, and let's face it, it's unlikely that orcs would be overly concerned with the finer points of spelling.  I can just imagine being seated by a surly green-skinned monstrosity with tusks and pointed ears, and then watching frantic goblins equipped with a variety of steampunk tools and accessories struggling with a wheezing, bubbling fermentation tank in order to produce a pint of Saruman's White. (And I bet that hardly anyone would ever be brave enough - or drunk enough - to chat up the waitresses.*)

Seriously, I think that the idea of a Tolkien-themed brewery is a marketable concept, and why not call it Steam Orks?  I think that it has a nice, um, ring to it.

- Sid

* I was hoping to put up a picture for this, but trust me, you do NOT want to see some of the things that come up if you do a Google™ image search for "sexy orc".