Old Ox Brewery and Red Bull in Spat Over Bovine Trademarks

Yesterday, Old Ox Brewery President Chris Burns released an open letter to Red Bull over a complaint the energy drink producer filed about the brewery’s trademarks. This was the big news story yesterday, and you no doubt may have heard about it, but just in case you didn’t, here’s a bunch of coverage of it. The Washingtonian’s Benjamin Freed has a must-read interview with Chris Burns. Meanwhile, The Washington Post’s Fritz Hahn’s coverage is here. John Holl of All About Beer posted here, and the comments section on the article is a pretty rich read. A petition has already popped up on Change.org (it’s not, as far as I can tell, affiliated with the brewery) asking Red Bull to drop the complaint.

What’s all this about exactly? Mostly it’s about the difference between a bull and an ox and whether consumers can tell the difference between them. Who knew that there’s an entire website devoted to telling the difference between two things? Even more odd than this lawsuit is that it wasn’t the