Over the Moon

Just as our tasting room was nearing completion last September 2016, we received a message from a brewery down south in BC about our moon logo. They had apparently just trademarked a crescent moon with a face on it in Canada related to beer, and they asked us if we would stop using our moon man in order to protect their trademark.

 

Of course we had our moon man everywhere. He was on our bottle caps, beer labels, coasters, tap handles, locally hand-crafted pottery mugs, growlers, t-shirts, hoodies and even baby onesies!  We were even about to print a huge moon man decal for our tasting room wall.  As soon as we got the call, we put on hold all merchandise orders that were in line for production.  We emailed the local potter who was making more moon beer mugs for us and we put our second order of hoodies and tshirts on hold. Then we thought long and hard about what we wanted to do.

 

 

While there may have been a chance we could argue with lawyers that our moon was different and that we've been using it just about as long as the other brewery had, the trademark would still likely win. It just didn't seem worth it to get into a legal dispute with thousands of dollars of legal fees and lawyers. Especially at a time when our tasting room was just getting up and running and we'd finished a large brewery expansion.  So we decided to get over the moon and start phasing it out. Get your moon man products while they last (#vintagewinterlong #collectorsitem)!  While we may still have thousands of bottle caps to go through, we have already changed our beer labels and made sure new merchandise orders are moonless. We also just recently replaced our tap handles with some rustic handpainted ones

 

 

Maybe someday we will find a suitable replacement, though our moon man has left some seriously big boots to fill! On the bright side, we are evermore dedicated to continuing to make the best beer we can, and no one can take that away from us!