Lagunitas vs Knee Deep

It would only benefit the customer if they did pick up a Knee Deep instead of a Lagunitas IPA by mistake - they would be getting a better product!

Originally posted by bytemesis
It would only benefit the customer if they did pick up a Knee Deep instead of a Lagunitas IPA by mistake - they would be getting a better product!

I agree completely. Lagunitas should put their effort into product quality, not label policing.

You have to keep in mind that when Lagunitas came out with this beer, it was probably the only bottled beer simply called IPA at least in California (but shit, I could be wrong). That was really their brand for a long time as a brewery. I have friends who think Lagunitas and IPA are interchangeable as brands. That’s how well they have branded that beer. Seriously, not everyone is a beer geek. Some people just like a flavorful beer and don’t have to look it up on rate beer. Just some perspective. Don’t underestimate how little attention people pay to details on packaging or how little they know about what they are buying in the first place.

Greetings All...
The thing about brand identity issues is a big deal, but not for reasons of policing or property or of beating up on each other because we can... It’s nothing like that at all. As a founder-type my thoughts are almost always focused on an unknowable future. I talked this morning with the other brewer and we had a cool talk. The thing for both of us is about the future. I am assuming that LAG will continue to do well, and I am also assuming that they will do well, maybe they’ll do great and be the next big thing. That’s totally possible. At that point when they may have shrunk it down a bit and it is on a 12oz bottle or a 120z can and by compressing the art it looks similar (not precisely) to our labels, it’ll be difficult, ultimately for both of us. We’ll both want to look individual. So this is another ’good fences make good neighbors’ thing.

Why did I discuss it on twitter? Because the world of forums was going to have a say in it all anyway... so I just thought, this being your industry to patronize or not, I’d give you the first input. The guy that started this thread called that bush. I don’t think he’s had to decide about such fundamentally difficult things like this before, because if he had, he’d show a little more deference to my own unseen internal decision making process. Stuff like this is a drag but it is as important as making great beer which is something, contrary to a couple posters here, i think we rock with.

Cheers RB !

p.s.... I really object to the title of this thread.... if you really understood you would know how much that is not the case...

SamGamgee
You’re right about the past when we were the only brewery calling it simply ’IPA’.. Most consumers actually called it ’EEEpaa’ for many years... Other IPA’s were spelled out as India Pale Ale and had Bangalore India elements in the graphics... more like Maharaja is now. When breweries later started just calling it an IPA on their labels it took a long while before they’d eliminate the periods between the three letters as we did from the start. Today it’s like NASA, not N.A.S.A. These things we did early in the history but I would never claim any sort of ridiculous ownership of any of it. It is the ’folk’ part of the Craft brew process... stuff getting handed down. None of that is the same as the very shapes of the elements, the positive and negative spaces that make a label an icon, if one is very lucky, over time. The way that COKE is far less a word than it is a shape and a sound.

Originally posted by DYCSoccer17
I think both labels are incredibly similar. Light background. Bold "IPA" in the middle with "India Pale Ale" spelled out below it. Above the "IPA" on each label also has the brewer’s name. I think Lagunitas has a bit of a beef here, but I think they’re handling it in the poorest way imaginable.

Time for a Deepanitas Collab quad IPA!