A Brewery By Any Other Name

might still violate copywriter laws

Ah, the good old days. When I started my first brewery, you could come up with almost any name and no one else was using it. After all, there weren’t that many breweries at the time.

By 2000, things were really changing. When I opened the Palisade Brewery in 2003, I was trying to come up with a name for my IPA. I wanted something easy with only two syllables at the most. The idea came to me when I looked out my kitchen window and saw my red 1954 Chevy pick up in the driveway. “Well shoot, there you go, Red Truck IPA”.

Our labels were to imitate the 1930’s fruit crate labels, as Palisade is known for peaches and other fruits. Randy Mosher, who I hired to help design the logo and labels, loved the idea. The resulting label was very cool indeed.

Sales took off. We distributed on the western slope of Colorado and up towards the Vail valley. One day a friend came into the brewery and said he saw a wine with the same name and a very similar label. Oh shit.

I quickly contacted my lawyer and asked him to get a federal trademark for the label. It took a bit of time but we weren’t quick enough. Apparently Klein Vinyards, who made Red Truck red wine, discovered us at the same time we discovered them and beat us on the federal trademark - by about two weeks! I took a chance and called up the winery and spoke with Fred Klein the owner and basically asked him if we could just get along. He said yes, and we wound up displaying our beer along side their wine. By the way, there are lots of other red trucks out there now, and I’m not sure how they handle it with Fred.

Another good example is my friend Steve McFate. He took our class in 2010, and his vision was to open a brewery in Scottsdale, Arizona and call it Fate Brewing. With that name he applied for his TTB, designed his logo, and there was even a mention in the Phoenix paper about his upcoming brewery. At about the same time a group in Boulder came up with the name Fate as well. However, they registered their name with the Federal Trademark Bureau and got it trademarked.

After Steve had been open for about a year or so and very successful, the Boulder group sent him a cease and desist order telling Steve he could no longer use that name. In research we found that Steve had already used the name in his application, web site, and been in the paper two months before the Boulder Fate applied for their trademark. There is a place on the trademark application asking to the best of your knowledge you know of no other use for the name. A simple google search would have shown Steve’s brewery, but they must have marked no and received their trademark. Steves lawyers said even with that information they most likely wouldn’t prevail in a very expensive court case, so Steve had to change the name to McFate Brewing.

Scottsdale, Arizona

Boulder, Colorado

I AM NOT A LAWYER so take what I say, with a grain of salt and for what it’s worth. If you are planing your brewery and you have a cool name do your research on that name before anything else.

For example, let’s say I want to name my brewery America’s Best Brewery. Well, the first thing I’m going to do is to Google that name. There I just did. No one seems to be using it. I also checked on Facebook to see if a home brewer was using it - nothing.

Next I will go to the United States Patent and Trademark search site called TESS and do a search on that name. Guess what? No one is using it.

I would also do a domain name search. For this I would use a site like Godaddy and search for americasbestbrewery.com. Hmmm, there isn’t one.

At this point I would feel comfortable in logo design and getting americasbestbrewery.com captured by paying the $12 fee for a year. Also in this day and age I would recommend that you go ahead and file for a federal trademark with your name and your logo. You can use a lawyer, or you could do this yourself.

Your breweries name and any labels you come up with are really worth a lot of money for years to come. It’s as important as making good beer that you protect your name. It is the goose that will lay golden eggs for the next twenty years plus, so it deserves all the seriousness of everything else you are doing to make your brewery a reality.

Postscript: Fate Brewing in Boulder went out of business and sold the rights to the Fate Brewing name back to Steve, so now there is only one Fate Brewing, and it’s in Scottsdale.