MISQUAH — It was not, the Holts want the record to show, a fight. “It was a war,” Annika Holt said. “Wars have rules. Fights don’t.”

The rules, as described Saturday evening at a table in the back of their own taproom, were these: neither party could raise the subject at the brewery, both parties had to be able to state the other’s position to the other’s satisfaction before arguing against it, and no decision could be made after nine at night. The war ran, by their joint reckoning, about eleven months.

Jonas Holt wanted Big Pelican. His case, which he still maintains was the correct one, was that it is the largest lake, the one the town is actually on, the one every visitor has heard of, and the one that would look best on a delivery truck if there is ever a delivery truck. “It’s a good name,” he said. “It is a completely good name.”

Annika Holt wanted Mud Lake, and spent nine of the eleven months unable to explain exactly why, which she says is the part her husband found hardest to argue with. The argument arrived last winter, in the front office, while she was doing something else. “I’d been asking people to name the seven lakes. Everybody does the same thing. They list six — Big Pelican, Loon, Whitefish, Bass, Little Pelican, Cedar — and then they stop, and then they go: ‘and Mud.’ Every single person. There’s a pause and then ‘and Mud,’ like they’re admitting something.”

She told Jonas that the lake that has to be explained is the one worth putting on a sign, because a name that requires a sentence is a name that starts a conversation, and a taproom that does not start conversations is a room with chairs in it. Jonas Holt considered this for, by his estimate, four days. “She was right,” he said. “I want it in the paper that I said she was right, because otherwise she’ll say it for me and it’ll be longer.”

The lettering was done in July by a sign painter out of Hinckley, working inside the building with the windows papered. The canvas went up the same afternoon. Asked why they covered it at all rather than simply opening with the name showing, Annika Holt gave the answer this newspaper has been waiting three weeks for and which, in the event, took four words. “Because then,” she said, “you’d have all found out on a Tuesday.”