Lafayette’s Odd13 Brewing has agreed to change the name of its Hanuman IPA after a Hindu leader from Nevada said using the deity’s name on a beer was “highly inappropriate.”
Rajan Zed, the founder of Universal Society of Hinduism in Reno, Nevada, called for the name change in a press release on Sunday and said using the name of Hanuman for commercial purposes was “not OK.”
“Lord Hanuman was highly revered in Hinduism and he was meant to be worshipped in temples or home shrines and not to be used in selling beer for mercantile greed,” Zed said in a statement.
Ryan Scott, one of the founders of Odd13, this morning said he was made aware of Zed’s feelings overnight after someone tweeted the statement to the brewery. He noted that Zed had not reached out to the brewery itself.
Nevertheless, Scott said the name of the beer will be dropped and the description of the beer changed on the brewery’s website this morning.
“We didn’t mean for it to be offensive and it’s not a big deal for us to change it,” Scott said.
Odd13 opened in 2013 on 301 East Simpson St. in Lafayette as a superhero-themed brewery where “every beer has a personality,” according to the brewery’s website. “If we can’t write a story about it, it doesn’t get made. Some beers are heroic. Others are villainous. Some are just sidekicks.”
On the website, Odd13 describes Hanuman as a “kind shapeshifting super-monkey duped into evil acts by Zed the Zorcerer. He has been sent on a quest seeking the perfect variety of the magical herb Humulus Lupulus. Hanuman seeks out hop varieties one by one, searching for the perfect combination of bitterness flavor and aroma to please Zed.”
Scott said the name for the beer originally came from a Facebook contest. He said he will likely hold another Facebook contest to rename the single-hop IPA.
“We’ll be a little bit more careful with choosing the winner this time,” Scott said.