The emergence of a new Cascadian Dark Ale brewing style has forced Steamworks Brewing Co. owner Eli Gershkowitz to make a pivotal business decision.
The longtime owner of the iconic 18-year-old Steamworks brew pub on Water Street has served self-brewed beers branded “Cascadian” since the 1990s.
Gershkowitz now has two options. First, he can vigorously defend his Canadian trademark to use the word “Cascadian” when marketing beer products. Or he can simply ignore what he believes are encroachments on his trademark and focus his energy on expanding his seven-month-old enterprise selling packaged beer.
“I believe [Granville Island Brewing (GIB)] is infringing on my trademark – but I have to make a real-life business decision,” Gershkowitz told Business in Vancouver between sips of a latte while sitting on a patio on a sunny Vancouver afternoon.
“We’re a small brewery and we need to focus management attention and energy on our expansion.”
Gershkowitz has invested more than $1 million to build a 29,400-square-foot brewery on William Street in Burnaby that is set to be completed in July. Splitting his focus by taking other brewers to court would be a distraction, he said.
Gershkowitz’s expansion involves ending a contract with Aldergrove’s Dead Frog Brewery to brew his packaged beer. He will hire staff and have about 12 employees at his Burnaby brewery. No Dead Frog employees will be laid off because the company will brew beer under contract for others, president Derrick Smith said.
Steamworks’ packaged beer sales are rising at about 40% per month, and the company is on pace to produce about 200,000 litres of packaged product by September. When the new facility opens, production will ramp up to a pace of 750,000 litres annually. The brewery’s capacity will be more than two million litres per year.
Gershkowitz’ decision to focus on this growth – at the expense of taking the time to enforce his exclusive right in Canada to use the word “Cascadian” – will come at a cost. His ability to protect that trademark in the future will be substantially diminished, Fasken Martineau partner and intellectual property lawyer David Wotherspoon told BIV.
Other brewers have started to use Cascadian Dark Ale to describe what has historically been known as American Black Ale and is a dark India Pale Ale.
Competitors using the word “Cascadian” on their labels hurt Steamworks’ trademark as much as if the word was part of the competing beers’ brands, Wotherspoon added.
Gershkowitz last year phoned some local brewers and alerted them to his trademark. One agreed to stop using the word Cascadian as soon as it ran out of labels. Phillips Brewing Co. agreed to stop using the word on its packaging after Gershkowitz sent a cease-and-desist letter, he said.
GIB remained unfazed by legal threats and released its Cloak and Dagger Cascadian Dark Ale earlier this month.
“We consider Cascadian Dark Ale to be an emerging style,” GIB president Jim Lister told BIV. “It’s not a brand to us. It’s a style of beer.”
He then equated it to how GIB produces a Robson Street Hefeweizen, with Hefeweizen being recognized as a style of German wheat beer.
U.S. craft brewers have also started to use the phrase Cascadian Dark Ale in the past few years. Gershkowitz’s failure to register his trademark in the U.S. has left opened the door for those brewers to use the phrase, Wotherspoon said.
“By allowing competitors to use the term ‘Cascadia’ and not enforcing his rights then [Gershkowitz] is allowing it to become a generic term.” •
