I know many of you dont subscribe to the weekly newsletter, so heres this weeks rant. Hopefully I don’t lose any friends over this one. A beer story that everybody was talking about this week involved a lawsuit between Lagunitas Brewing and Sierra Nevada Brewing. The former filed an official complaint about the latter’s use of the term “IPA.” Not exactly that, the complaint stated that Sierra Nevada’s “mark” looked too similar to Lagunitas’ established mark. On Facebook and beyond, people expressed their disapproval of Lagunitas actions, with all the obligatory promises to boycott and so on. Sierra Nevada is the 7th largest brewery in the country, Lagunitas the 11th—ranked amongst all 3,300 breweries in the U.S. and not just craft breweries. By most beer lovers standards, both Lagunitas and Sierra Nevada are big companies. Still, beer drinkers expect them to behave like mom-n-pop businesses, guided by a brewer’s code, an imaginary moral compass, instead of the bottom line. Here’s what burns me out. Just because they make beer and not bombs, we shouldn’t hold them to a different moral standard than we hold the companies that manufacture our shoes, cheese, and cell phones. I carry an iPhone because I like it, not because Apple is some morally superior company. The craft beer industry has grown up and its time craft beer drinkers grow up too. Beer drinkers will walk around all day in a pair of shoes manufactured by Chinese prisoners of political conscience, but will boycott Lagunitas over something like this? I’m having trouble digesting this “moral high ground” thing and would rather simply focus on digesting the beer. I know many of you disagree with me. Look, I don’t like it either. I wish nobody every sued anybody over anything, and I understand people’s emotional, personal attachment to beer, but at some point we all need to realize that the beer business is comprised of equal parts beer and business. Lagunitas has now dropped the lawsuit, by the way. Public outcry on social media led the company to reconsider its position. Good job, people! In the meantime, that kid who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square is probably still in prison manufacturing video game consoles. In closing, I want to point out one very important fact: none of this has anything to do with how the beer actually tastes. I guess thats my point.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 21:57:17 +0000
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