As if Finland did not already have enough alcoholic beverages themed around its most famous son, Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, the Kallio Brewery forges ahead with a “Tropical Milk IPA” named Madahan. That’s 馬達漢 to you, the Chinese name conferred upon Finland’s future president during his two-year trek across Asia on horseback from 1906-08, in which he pretended to be a Swedish explorer, but was actually a spy for the Russians.

Mannerheim’s Chinese name continues to confuse many Finns. It does not, as he once believed, and as the Madahan label continues to assert, mean “the horse that leaps through the clouds.” It means “the horse reaches China,” a sweetly literal description of Mannerheim’s ride across Asia.

But the Madahan name carries with a bunch of other baggage, much of which eluded Mannerheim during his explorations. The word “ma” literally means “horse”, although it was, and is, also a common Muslim surname in Western China, deriving from the first syllable of the name Mohammed. As a result, several interfering officials tried to get Mannerheim to change it as he travelled, although they didn’t tell him why. Some said that his Chinese surname was “wrong”. In places, it may well have been, since his sneering nemesis, the French explorer Paul Pelliot, may have pranked him by substituting a word meaning “drunk” or “stupid”.

Kallio’s Madahan IPA has a colourful picture of Mannerheim, his moustache grown back after his clean-shaven early months on the road, sitting atop the faithful Philip, who carried him all the way to Beijing.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy.