If visitors to Maine Beer Co.’s Freeport tasting room don’t know the story behind the name of its most popular IPA, they will by the time they leave.

Hanging from the ceiling is the skeleton of a 53-foot fin whale, an homage to the animal that brewery co-founder David Kleban and his daughter, Zoe (herself the namesake of an amber ale), adopted by making a donation at a museum in Bar Harbor in 2009 — a whale named Lunch.

Beers named Dinner, Second Dinner and Breakfast have followed, but Maine Beer Co. creative director Carrie Seaver hopes the whale skeleton, installed about a month ago, will bring the narrative back to the name’s true meaning — and the brewery’s charitable giving — “in a really big way.”

With nearly 10,000 breweries in the country churning out new beers all the time, coming up with a name for every one has led to some interesting choices. For 207 Beer Week — whose tap takeovers, tastings and other events started Saturday and run through Sunday — we decided to find out the stories behind a handful of the state’s most recognizable and most unusual beer names.

While many Maine beers borrow from local landmarks (like Rising Tide’s Back Cove) or simply riff off the flavor (Lone Pine’s Oh-J), other references are less obvious. Marshall Wharf’s Cant Dog has nothing to do with a canine but a tool used in logging. Bunker’s Machine reflects the factory jobs of people who might drink the sort of mass-market lager that it’s emulating. Curieux is the Belgian-ization of “curious,” the name suggested by a part-time Allagash employee after brewers wondered what would happen if they aged golden ale Tripel in bourbon barrels.

Here are a few more tales of how Maine beers got their names:

THE SUBSTANCE ALE, BISSELL BROTHERS

The Substance seems like a natural fit for the hazy, juicy IPA that helped popularize the New England style, but it wasn’t a stroke of marketing genius that led to the name; it was a mushroom trip. Noah Bissell said he and his brother ingested the hallucinogens in Nevada while making their way across the country and, between laughing fits, kept asking each other “what crazy substance” they’d consumed. The term came back to them years later when trying to find a name for their flagship beer, since simplified to Substance by the general public and known as Subby in-house.

Another fun tidbit: TV shows are also a source of inspiration for Bissell. Swish is the name of a homemade liquor from “Trailer Park Boys,” and Here’s to Feeling Good All The Time is a line from “Seinfeld,” delivered by Kramer before chugging a beer with a cigarette in his mouth while spying on Jerry’s accountant at a bar.

HIPSTER APOCALYPSE, MASON’S BREWING CO.

About a year into brewing, Mason’s was getting feedback that their beer was good but their branding was boring. So, they went in the opposite direction from their muted tones with a new line of boldly designed 16-ounce cans by “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” comic artist Ben Bishop. With names like Ghost Reaper and Mushroom Cloud, they adopted a theme of “death, destruction, chaos, mayhem, end of the world, that kind of thing,” owner Chris Morley said. The last of that line was Hipster Apocalypse, the description Morley’s friend gave of a beer event he attended, full of guys with goatees in hoodies.

GIGANTIC DAD PANTS, CUSHNOC BREWING CO.

Cushnoc didn’t initially want to make a New England IPA but knew its customers would expect one. In debating about whether to do it, an analogy was made to fashion and how, after a famous person wears really tight or baggy pants, other people’s clothing tends to shift in that direction without going to the same extreme, said co-founder Tobias Parkhurst. Similarly, they didn’t “have to make the gigantic dad pants” of hazy IPAs but could still do their own version. The head brewer joked that they might as well call it Gigantic Dad Pants because no one would drink it anyway. Eight years later, it’s their bestselling beer.

PANTLESS THUNDER GOOSE, MAST LANDING BREWING CO.

Flagship milk stout Gunner’s Daughter, named after a term for a cannon on a ship where crew members receive disciplinary lashings, is plenty attention-grabbing, but Pantless Thunder Goose has the better backstory.

Kevin McGlynn, vice president of sales, was working at another brewery when he and a coworker were scrolling the Internet on a slow day and came across a meme that assigned animals alternative names, like “trash panda” for a raccoon. But it was the one for an ostrich that hit their funny bone hardest. He jokingly kept suggesting it as a beer name, knowing it would never fly, but by his third day at Mast Landing, that changed. Late at night at a Manhattan bar during a work trip, someone mentioned there was a new double IPA in need of a name, and McGlynn’s suggestion got everyone laughing. Still, he didn’t think it was taken seriously until he saw a label had been mocked up. When Pantless Thunder Goose went onto win a gold medal at the World Beer Cup, McGlynn said hearing the presenter’s “confusion and maybe slight distaste for the name … is something that still puts a smile on my face.”