'Slow Ride' and Brewery Litigiousness

Earlier this week, I was informed of a legal dispute between New Belgium Brewing and Oasis Texas Brewing, a small operation out of Austin.

A good article on the issue can be found here.

The specifics of the dispute aren't particularly interesting - essentially, New Belgium's introducing a beer called Slow Ride, and filed a trademark to that effect. Oasis was first to market with an identically-named pale ale, and they've been hashing out a compromise for the past couple of months.

This argument brings up a couple of interesting points, but first I'd like to provide a bit more context.

Craft beer, since its resurgence almost 30 years ago, has been a strangely cooperative industry, with brewers often working together - sharing ingredients, recipes, and equipment - and often informally agreeing not to compete locally with similar styles. The reasons for this are myriad and vary from brewery to brewery, but I think the biggest is simply that craft brewers haven't really been competing against each other. Rather, their aim has been to siphon off drinkers of large macro-based breweries such as SAB MillerCoors or AB Inbev. And someone who gets hooked on one small brewery's IPA is probably more likely to try another's.

So the general aim of craft breweries hasn't been to create rabid, exclusive fans of specific breweries. Instead, they want to create generalist craft drinkers who might feel like a pint of Stone one night and an Oakshire the next. In this sense, by growing the total base of craft drinkers, the craft industry as a whole has benefited. And by all accounts, this strategy's been wildly successful - craft beer is posting national double digit gains for something like the 10th year in a row, and this seems to show no signs of slowing down.

This rapid growth is beginning to have consequences, though, as this lawsuit illustrates. With something like 3000 breweries and pubs operating in the US, each producing many distinct beers, it's probably inevitable that lawsuits and disagreements like this would happen. What's remarkable to me isn't that these are happening - it's that they're not happening more often.

I wonder what things will look like when breweries start seeing each other as true rivals and begin to behave accordingly. I think over the next several years, we'll start to see a definite shift as craft beer stops stealing chunks of the macro-based market and has to grow by competing on its own terms.