It seems you can mingle beers in a box, but you can't call that box a "mingler" of beer.
Two B.C. breweries worked up a head of steam over that trademarked word.
It has been locked up in law by the Molson Coors company, owners of Granville Island Brewing Company (GIB), when used it in a boozy context.
In a letter to Pacific Western Brewing Company (PWB), obtained by The Citizen, the Molson Coors/GIB company demanded a royalty payment for the use of their trademarked word. It was set at 50 cents per case. For those that got out into the marketplace, the amount totalled $600.
"I bet it cost them more than $600 to get the lawyers to write the letter," said PWB's product development manager, Paul Mulgrew.
Mulgrew, told The Citizen that the independent brewery has grown to the point it can release a "greatest hits" package of sorts, a 12-pack box of beer with a smattering of their different flavours inside.
Several breweries do the same, including GIB. Mulgrew said he had no idea anyone else had ever used the word, but he thought PWB's mixed bag (box) of brews should be called a mingler.
"We already use the word 'mixer' for our soda products so I didn't want to use that on our beer side, so, sorry, I used my thesaurus and came up with 'mingler' instead," he said.
GIB first plucked that word out of the synonym book in 2004.
"A lot of people would call it a 'mixed pack' or 'variety pack' but our product development people liked the word 'mingler' and thought it was so unique and applicable to the product that it was part of it," said GIB general manager Walter Cosman. "And the trademark people also felt that way and allowed us to register it. It is seen as proprietary to our company."
Mulgrew said he checked to see if anyone had an intellectual property or copyright claim on the word, but said a deeper search would have needed a costly legal team. He said he was also caught off guard because he understood trademark law to disallow any claims on descriptor words that were not intrinsically germane to the product itself.
In other words, if "Mingler Cream Ale" was the name of the beer itself he would have considered it off limits but because "mingler" referred only to the style of packaging, he was not focused on it.
Cosman countered that it was posted on the federal government's intellectual property website (www.cipo.gc.ca) and indeed a Citizen staff person untrained in matters of trademark or copyright found it in less than a minute.
Cosman phoned PWB with what he called a "gentlemen's agreement" and told them to stop using the word and pull the product that was already made.
PWB countered that their so-called mingler was a limited edition - 5,000 boxes - and was nearly cycled out of the marketplace already. They promised to pull the word from their website, strike the term from any further plans, and put a sticker over the labels they could still access.
Cosman said it sounded fair but he would consult his legal people.
That's when the suds got blown off the "gentlemen's agreement" said Mulgrew.
"We will not pay anything. We will believe in the gentlemen's agreement, as they put it," he said.
Cosman told The Citizen in his opinion, the glass was half full on this matter.
"We are willing to accept the fact that they are well into January and as long as they adhere to their promise to have the product fully removed by the end of this month then that is fine, we will accept that, as a gentlemen's agreement. If so, no, that royalty payment won't be necessary. We wanted to explain what our options are, but no that won't be necessary, because we believe they will live by their word to have the product removed in that time frame."
There's no sense crying over spilt beer, especially, said Mulgrew, since they historically have family ties. PWB was born in Prince George and still has a base there and in Burnaby, but they and GIB were once under the umbrella of the same parent company, Potters, before being parceled off to different owners.
It is the first time such an issue has ever emerged in both Cosman's and Mulgrew's experience. It shouldn't take long, they both suggested, before they would be able to look back over a cold pint and laugh about this.
