A Solution to the Trademark Bottleneck

The proliferation of new beer names is hitting a point of absurdity. They range from the unfortunate and campy to the interminably long, and developing new and creative beer names is taking up increasing amounts of brewers’ time. One reason underlying the campaign for wackiness and length stems from a need to create clear space between a brewery and its competitors to protect against trademark disputes. The inevitable overlap of beer names requires brewers to expand their lexicons to new and unusual environs. The brewers I’ve spoken with all lament the need for this process and seem ready for an alternative.

There is, of course, a simple solution to the trademark problem, one that would also help consumers: Just use a style name. The wine world has long used this approach through its reliance on promoting varietals, such as Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. In an industry with more than 8,000 American wineries, clear advantages can be seen in selling by style. More than three-quarters of American winemakers are considered very small or have limited production; many of them are the brewing equivalent of a nano. With that many different producers and respective brands, the use of anything more than a house name could result in an impossibly large number of wine names to follow. The approach of promoting a brewery name instead of silly and often groan-inducing, individual brand names makes sense, as the house name is the one that brewers want consumers to remember.

This of course would require brewers to work to style, or at least revert back to a closer reliance on them. Unlike the wine world, which appears boxed in by a smaller number of a varietals and the need to classify products by grape types, the beer world has no such limitations. As an IPA needn’t be made with a specific type of hop (the way Chardonnay must be made with a particular type of grape), brewers can still choose from a dazzling number of hop interactions, not to mention different malt bases.

As beer-style guidelines continue to grow in numbers and the definitions of individual styles expand, brewing to style no longer means the same thing today as it did 20 years ago. In rejecting the stodgy and ridiculously rigid guidelines promulgated by the BJCP and Brewers Association, brewers have created their own takes on the classic staples. As I wrote last month, the era of these guidelines is over. While they may seem necessary in governing competitions such as the Great American Beer Festival, they otherwise try to provide order to an inherently chaotic world. Just as the definition of jazz expanded to include fusion, funk and acid—all remaining under the jazz moniker—so can craft beer. IPA can and now does mean many different things, including White, Black and Wheat IPAs.

This is no longer the Era of Extreme, when brewers wildly grabbed obscure and unusual ingredients and tossed them into the kettle or conditioning tank to see what would happen, like a sixth grader mixing compounds and chemicals in an unsupervised chemistry lab. Brewers have matured and the craft beer industry is very much a business, with billions of dollars at stake. And craft brewers have to get over themselves. Most of the thousands of beers they produce fall well within even broadly defined style categories. Returning to simple style names is hardly a tall order or one that stifles brewers’ creativity. As the very character of beer styles changes and evolves, so can consumers’ understanding of them. As opposed to letting a handful of industry associations dictate terms, brewers should reclaim and redefine styles for themselves. ■