Court fight over beer slogan loses its fizz after Charlotte brewer drops complaint

So much for the “juicy” legal fight over dueling beer labels.

Charlotte’s Sycamore Brewing Co. has dropped its trademark-infringement lawsuit against a well-known California competitor little more than a month after filing it, and it did so after Stone Brewing launched a major counter-offensive in court.

Stone also dropped its counter-complaint as well as a related court action in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In its April complaint, Sycamore accused Stone of claim-jumping its trademark “Keep it Juicy” slogan, which the Charlotte brewer uses to market its popular Juiciness IPA. (Sycamore has a second trademark on “Juiciness.”)

The lawsuit accused Stone of introducing the protected phrase on the packaging of its Hazy IPA this year in the eight states, including the Carolinas, where the companies compete.

Early on, Sycamore won a temporary injunction from U.S. District Judge Frank Whitney, forcing Stone to cover up the offending wording on more than 21,000 cases of beer stored in warehouses around the country.

In its lawsuit, Sycamore, which opened its first brewery in 2013, branded Stone as a “trademark bully” that had “lost its way” as a cornerstone of the craft-beer industry in which brewers support each other as much as they compete.

“While it used to preach the gospel of ‘community’ in craft beer, it now seeks to damage smaller breweries by filing questionable trademark actions against them and to steal the trademarks of those smaller breweries it believes will not fight back. Sycamore is fighting back,” the original lawsuit said.

So did Stone, the ninth-largest craft beer producer in the country.

It countersued on May 3, calling for the removal of Sycamore’s trademarks — claiming that the use of “juicy” in the craft-beer industry is so common that Sycamore should not have received the trademarks in the first place. It also accused Sycamore of withholding that information from Whitney and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

As with Sycamore’s complaint the month before, Stone made its legal attacks highly personal, even derisive. Two companies on opposite sides of the country independently came up with the same generic slogan, Stone said:

“Sycamore’s overblown contentions that Stone for some reason intentionally copied the packaging of a hardly known regional brewery are baseless, and are a waste of this Court’s time.”

Stone’s complaint also claimed that Sycamore went to court as “some sort of misguided publicity vehicle,” delving at length into Sycamore’s penchant for designing beer labels that blare sexual themes — including Christmas-themed products that featured fornicating reindeer, and gingerbread men and women practicing bondage.

Sycamore dropped its complaint last week. Stone did likewise. Both sides claimed victory.

“We absolutely got what we came for ... I feel great about what Sycamore accomplished and feel great that it’s over,” Sycamore co-owner Justin Brigham said in a statement released by his attorneys.

In the end, he said, Sycamore avoided “a war of attrition against a massive, private equity-backed corporation to no foreseeable end ... I only wish Stone’s CEO had been willing to chat working, equitable terms at the outset when I first spoke to her and before Sycamore and Stone ever met in court.”

In her statement, Stone CEO Maria Stipp said her company ran up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses defending itself against “Sycamore’s baseless trademark claims and opportunism.”

“At the end of the day, the truth came out,” Stipp said in a prepared statement. “We are thrilled that Stone (and Sycamore, for that matter) can now turns its attention back to making great beer.”