Cigar City Brew News

(2 days worth of beery goodness)

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One of the Challenges Little Breweries Face

Matt Nadeau is the owner of Rock Art a small brewery in Vermont. One of the beers that Rock Art makes is a barley wine named Vermonster. At 10% abv it is one Monster of a beer. So Vermonster is fitting.

Monster Energy Drink Company is a one billion a year corporation. They sell energy drinks. Not beer. The packaging for Monster Energy Drink looks nothing like the packaging for Rock Art's Vermonster. Yet Monster Energy Drink sent a cease and desist order to Rock Art telling them that because of a likelihood of consumer confusion, Rock Art needed to stop using the name Vermonster.

It's ridiculous on its face. But the rub is that if you don't have the cash on hand to fight the mega-corporation it doesn't matter how ridiculous the claim is. The big company will win and you'll have to bow down to the, But, Matt Nadeau says it better himself:

"What is exceptionally hilarious to me is that there is another Barely Wine
brewed by Brooklyn Brewing named literally Monster. And that beer has been around longer than Monster Energy Drink. So it makes me wonder.....if Vermonster (a beer) is infringing on Monster (an energy drink) then isn't Monster (the energy drink) infringing on the older Monster beer? Seems like Brooklyn Brewery has a great case!"

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New Tanks Arrived. New Beers on Draft, 110K+OT #2 Ready To Go

We unloaded our new tanks today. When they are in place it will roughly double our tank capacity, which will in theory alleviate some of the beer shortages we have had lately. We also got the bottler running yesterday and ran a few test bottles through it and it actually ran through its processes fairly well. We still need to do a lot of work to get it where it needs to be, but it was a promising day.

We'll have a few beers on draft for growlers this week: Humidor Bolita, Cuban Espresso Maduro, Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Brown Ale, Vanilla Maduro and Humidor Series India Pale Ale. We'll also be prepping some Humidor Series Imperial Stout that will be available in growlers in the coming weeks.

We have a very busy schedule this week. Brewed IPA and packaged IPA today. We will be brewing/filtering tomorrow. Marshal Zhukov's Imperial Stout will start going out to distributors this week, but we still have some for sale until then. And of course Barrel Aged 110K+OT Batch #2 will be available tomorrow between 11 AM and 5 PM. The limit is 8 bottles per person and the price is $20 per 750ml bottle. 449 bottles were made.

I'll get pics of the new tanks up tomorrow. In the meantime here is a nice piece on Cigar City Brewing at dcfoodies.com.

Cheers,
Joey