Had myself one hell of a fu*king beer last evening & was curious why the name. Turns out Fucking Hell is a German pilsner and is not considered to be a true Hellbier. It is named after the Austrian village of Fucking while Hell is the German word for 'pale lager' and a typical description for this type of beer.
Interestingly Fucking Hell is not brewed in Fucking. It was originally brewed in the Brauerei Waldhaus, a brewery in the Black Forest town of Waldhaus, Weilhem in Germany. From 2013, production moved to the Brauerei Hartmannsdorf in Hartmannsdorf near Chemnitz. At the time of the launch of Fucking Hell, there was no brewery in the village of Fucking.
The beer came about when in 2010, three German businessmen, Stefan Fellenberg, Florian Krause and Hans-Jörg Schaller devised a plan to bring a new beer to market. Krause was originally from Bad Reichenhall, a Bavarian town 20 km over the border from the Austrian village of Fucking.
The village's name inspired them to devise a humorous brand name, combined with the German word "Hell" for 'pale lager', and they applied to register a Community Trade Mark for "Fucking Hell".
The European Union's Trademark office initially refused to grant a trademark for the beer on the grounds that it contained an expletive and was controversial.
However, Fellenberg and Krause argued that the name referred to the village in Austria and that Hell was an Austrian & Southern German term for pale lager. The Registration Office finally permitted the registration of the trademark, stating that the name was "an interjection used to express a deprecation, but it does not indicate against whom the deprecation is directed, nor can it be considered as reprehensible to use existing place names in a targeted manner (as a reference to the place), merely because this may have an ambiguous meaning in other languages." The beer finally went on sale in Europe, Asia and Australia in 2011.
