Left Hand Drops Efforts To Trademark “Nitro”

We brought you news of this trademark claim from Left Hand, and now an update from Westword:

Left Hand quietly dropped its efforts to trademark both the word "Nitro" as it relates to beer and the more specific "Nitro Milk Stout" in order to focus on building the brand across the country and on rebuilding goodwill among customers and competitors.

"It was never meant to piss anybody off, but to protect a ton of money and time that we had spent on it," says Left Hand spokesman Chris Lennert of both the process of packaging a nitrogenated beer and the efforts to trademark the name. "We were trying to protect ourselves from having one of the big guys come out with a package like that. But we said if we are going to get all this flak for it, then we don’t want to do it. So we came back and shifted our focus. We didn’t want to be negative."