Boston Beer Company v Anchor Brewing Company

It all started when Jim Koch, brewer of the world’s 2nd strongest fermented only beer after Ghost Deer, mocked TNP and STB for being ice-distilled. We decided to respond by brewing a beer stronger than Utopias and Ghost Deer was duly launched 5 weeks ago. We also put together a neat little video, guest-starring someone who may appear similar to Jim but may also just be a generic character from deep in our imagination. Here is the video:

However, it seems jolly old Jim is not nearly as good a sport as our sausage munching freunde at Schorschbrau and has not take our little jest in the spirit in which it was intended. After we launched the video and the beer, he decided to take out his devine wrath on our good friends and business associates at Anchor Brewing Company. Maybe he should have tried to brew a stronger beer instead, granted this is tough if you don’t have your own brewery. Hell, even the Queen herself did not mind her guest appearance in the Sink the Bismarck video blog, maybe she was just flattered that I kissed the picture of her.

His fury at loosing the title, and having a character similar to him appear in our video blog has been manifested in the form of a vindictive and irrational lawsuit against Anchor Brewing Company & a former Sam Adams sales rep combined with a personal attack on BrewDog’s long time, friend, investor and director Keith Greggor.

They are suing a 26 year old sales rep, Judd Hausner and Anchor Brewing Company, because apparently Judd has some ‘trade secrets’ and is breaking a non compete claus which is not even valid under California law (the contract was signed in Boston when Judd was 22 while he was finishing up his last semester at college). Non-compete clauses are also generally not enforcable all over the US for lower level employees, and not at all in California. A lot of the Sam Adams statement is purely delusional, stating Anchor were going to ‘fast track Judd’ into senior management and he reports directly to the owners. Until this kicked off the owners had not even met him. Jim Koch also chose to go straight to the media with his legal action, an unusual move. Anchor acted appropriately and are shocked that in 2011 there are companies still attempting to lock in junior employees through bogus non-competes.

We also took offense of Jim Koch’s public attack on Keith Greggor’s character and questioned his commitment to beer. Many BrewDog shareholder’s have met Keith at our Equity for Punks events and he is as committed to and passionate about craft beer as any other member of the BrewDog team. Keith invested in our craft beer start up, pretty much on pure faith after only having met with us once at 2008 Hamilton's Tavern in San Diego.  He leveraged a tiny import company to put a deal together to acquire Anchor Brewing with the full support of Fritz Maytag. With his own house on the line to personally guarantee the Anchor loans needed to avoid the need for professional equity investors, we would say he is pretty committed overall to craft beer overall.

Hey Jim, we are sorry. Lighten up dude. Maybe even have a beer. Punk IPA rocks with a game of darts.

xxxxxx    The BrewDog Team

Ps. BrewDog owns 5.25% of Anchor. So if you invest in BrewDog at www.brewdog.com/equityforpunks you will own a part of Anchor too, which is kinda cool.