West Sixth Brewing Being Sued By Magic Hat Over #9 Logo

We’ve had a great first year! Since opening last April, we’ve expanded our brewery a couple of times, added a second canned beer to our lineup, and have given over $10,000 to local charities in our area.

Unfortunately, our success has also made us a few enemies. And this week, one of those enemies got so mad, they decided to try and force us out of business by filing a silly and frivolous lawsuit against us.

Before we go any further, we do want to let you know that none of this will affect in any way our ability to continue brewing the great beers that you all have come to love. So, don’t worry about that at all!

Magic Hat is a brewery originally based out of Vermont. While they have some craft roots, they’ve been bought and sold a couple times since 2010, and are now owned by a company called Cerveceria Costa Rica. They’re claiming that we intentionally copied their logo, and that has caused them “irreparable harm”, enough that they’re asking for not only damages but also all our profits up until this point (little do they know that well, as a startup company, there wasn’t any, oops!).

Now, we all know that their claims are just a little bit silly:

We’ve talked to several lawyers, and they all agree there’s no legal merit to their lawsuit. And they’ve got fancy legal council out of New York, so they must be hearing the same thing.

In fact, we tried to reach out to them individually to see if there was any way to resolve the amicably, but to no surprise, no one ever called us back.

So, they clearly have another motive – which must be to make us spend so much money defending our actions that we have no other recourse than to cave to their demands.

Why would they do that? After all, they don’t sell all that much beer here in Kentucky. We don’t really know – although we have our suspicions. There’s clearly been someone in Lexington spreading the rumor that we were “about to get sued” – I even heard it from a checkout clerk at the grocery store! So, we’re guessing that someone in the area is prompting the lawsuit in order to try and hurt us locally.

We think it’s bad business to roll over. After all, we’ve spent a year defending our brand, and we’ve heard from tons of folks how much they love our logo.

We’re going to fight. And, we could use your help.

How can you help?

We know that as a company owned by an international conglomerate, the only value Magic Hat will listen to is their pocketbook, so that’s the only way we know to get them to stop.

When we collect 20,000 signatures, we’ll print them all out and bring them up to their US headquarters (which as best we can tell are now in New York – they’re not even in Vermont anymore) to deliver them in person. They won’t be able to ignore us then!

And a special note to any Magic Hat employees or management who may be reading this: if you want to reach out and have a reasonable discussion on this matter, we’re happy to at any time.

Also, if you’re an attorney or anyone else who thinks you could be of help, please do get in touch!

Thanks, we really appreciate it!
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