20As the craft brewing market continues to saturate (perhaps overly so, from a brewer’s perspective- not from a consumer’s perspective), similar (or even identical) names for individual lines of beer continue to become troublesome headaches for breweries. The latest in this recycled saga involves craft brewing giant, New Belgium Brewing Co. (based in Fort Collins, CO, with a sister location now in Asheville, NC), and Oasis Texas Brewing Company (based in Austin, TX), and a beer named “Slow Ride”.
Slow Ride Pale Ale
New Belgium filed suit against Oasis Texas in early February in Denver, CO, alleging trademark infringement of their Slow Ride brew, a lower-calorie IPA. Oasis Texas responded by asserting that it used the Slow Ride mark eight days prior to New Belgium. Interestingly, Oasis Texas appears to have won the first battle of this Trademark dispute, but only a battle- not the war. A federal magistrate judge in Colorado dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction over the action (New Belgium had asserted that the court had jurisdiction because Oasis Texas participated in the 2014 Great American Beer Festival in Denver) and declined to transfer the case to a court in Texas. New Belgium will likely re-file in Texas, so we will have to wait and see.
In the meantime, Oasis Texas’ legal fees to date are around $100,000, which, for a brewery that has only been around a little over a year, has to be crippling. Hopefully, these two breweries will be able to reach an agreement outside of court, for either concurrent use, or change of branding. These continued disputes (and resulting fees/costs) underscore the extreme importance of hiring an experienced trademark attorney to conduct a thorough trademark search (of not just the USPTO’s database, but also through other resources). Doing so, while costing a little bit up front, may prove to save a brewery a lot of money in the long run. If your brewery does run into a scenario like that of New Belgium and Oasis Texas (or Bell’s and Innovation Brewing), it would be wise to do what these Michigan and Indiana breweries did and reach an amicable solution outside of filling suit, over a beer. At worst, in the latter scenario, the two breweries can split some legal fees memorializing their agreement- fees that would not hold a candle to the $100,000 in legal fees Oasis Texas has paid.
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