A remarkable--remarkably unfortunate--thing is happening in the Hawkeye State. Bryan Roth has the details:

In a court filing issued on July 26, Iowa's Toppling Goliath Brewing Co. sought an injunction to stop a former brewer from working in the same position for his brother's business in Cedar Rapids.

Chris Flenker, who worked at Boulevard Brewing before joining Toppling Goliath from 2015 until January 2017, was hoping to continue his career at Thew Brewing, which opened in March of this year. Started by Flenker's brother, Travis, the brewery is about 100 miles from Decorah, which falls within a 150-mile non-compete Toppling Goliath agreed to with Chris, according to the Associated Press.

The "rationale" in forcing brewers to sign a non-compete is to protect, in the brewery's words, "proprietary recipes, formulas and techniques"--or "trade secrets" as it also characterized them. Is this a reasonable demand breweries can make of their brewers? We're going to come back to the case of Toppling Goliath in a moment, but I would like to take you back a generation to 1993, when a similar case created a massive stink here in Portland. There are lessons to be learned from how that all played out.

The incident involved Alan Sprints and Widmer Brewing. I spoke to Alan about it in writing my biography of Rob and Kurt, The Widmer Way. He had been hired there as a brewer in a company that was just beginning to develop a corporate mentality. They had him sign a non-compete agreement and when he departed a couple years later to start Hair of the Dog, they sued him.

“In my mind the non-compete agreement was to protect them if I was to take a recipe or graphics, or doing something they did, they’d be able to enforce their non-compete. They were a draft-only brewery that made only wheat beer and I was a bottle-only brewery that made mostly strong beer. So I saw it as totally different, but the wording of the document was, ‘Anybody who makes or sells beer, any place they make or sell beer.’”

Care to guess how this particular case turned out? It was a public relations disaster for Widmer, and seriously dented their reputation within the burgeoning craft beer scene. Local media covered it heavily, and the court was sympathetic to Sprints:

“But coming from the food service industry, if I was told I couldn’t cook anywhere, it would be difficult to make a living. And that’s what the court basically said—you can’t stop him from making a living, and you need to come to an agreement or the judge would. Fortunately we didn’t have to go to trial.”

Widmer was trying to protect an extremely lucrative product in Hefeweizen, which nearly every brewery in the region was trying to emulate. They had gotten some bad advice from their lawyer to initiate this practice, and soon ended the use of non-competes after the debacle. Nevertheless, it left a sour taste in many fans' mouths, and actually helped Alan launch his new project. (“The one good thing is that it did bring attention to the brewery, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a tactic.”) The two sides have since reconciled, but it took years for Widmer to recover from the damage.