(Salt Lake City, UT and Aurora, CO) – The more breweries and beers, the merrier? Not always.
Earlier this month, I tipped off that Dry Dock Brewing was removing the name, “Seven Seas,” from its IPA, mentioning that 7 Seas Brewing was established in Washington and that it may not be a coincidence. It turns out there is actually a story there. Westword reports:
Delange, who opened Dry Dock in 2005, said he asked 7 Seas owner Mike Runion if they could work something out along the lines of Avery Brewing of Boulder and California’s Russian River Brewing; those two breweries famously teamed up in 2004 on a brew called Collaboration Not Litigation Ale after discovering that they were both making Belgian-style beers with the name Salvation.
“But it was a ‘no, you need to change it,'” DeLange says. “The guy was being a real ass about it, which is not something you see that much in the craft brewing industry. I would have expected them to have taken the high road.”
Runion declined to talk about it, saying he was in the middle of making deliveries.
Also surfacing this past week was an NY arts group’s beef with Epic Brewing in Utah. The Salt Lake Tribune reports:
A New York-based arts foundation that preserves the legacy of artist Robert Smithson has threatened legal action against a Salt Lake City brewery for using an image of his iconic Spiral Jetty on a beer label.
Last year, Epic Brewing Co. launched an ale that it named Spiral Jetty IPA after Smithson’s world famous and much-photographed “earthwork” that juts into the northwestern arm of the Great Salt Lake. The label includes asumptuous photograph of the sun setting on the Spiral Jetty with a kayaker in the foreground.
“It’s not like we used a sketch that [Smithson] made,” says David Cole, co-owner of Epic Brewing. “We used a photographer and bought the rights to the photograph. This is perfectly legal. They have been very slow to act because I think they are trying to figure out what to do.”