Beer trademark wars might feel like the result of a crowded contemporary marketplace, but breweries have been filing C&Ds since way before Stone sued Keystone. That high-profile case seems to be taking a while, but it pales in comparison to the infamous global battle over the name “Budweiser,” which has gone on for about 112 years—long enough to merit its own Wikipedia entry. The commonly told version of that battle says that the original Budweiser actually comes from the Czech city of České Budějovice, a spire-capped, tower-filled South Bohemian burg that German speakers traditionally call Budweis. Unfortunately, the commonly told version is wrong.

As the story goes, in 1876, a St. Louis brewery started making a Lager it called Budweiser, meaning “from Budweis,” after the famous beer from the historical Czech town. The “original” Budweiser, it notes, is actually Budvar, a small Czech brewery that has been fighting the giant Anheuser-Busch—and now its parent company AB InBev—on multiple fronts for the right to use the Budweiser name since before World War I.

That version of the story has a couple of big holes, starting with the fact that Budvar—aka Budweiser Budvar—was founded in 1895. The American version dates to 1876. If the Czech Budweiser is 19 years younger, you might ask, how can it be the original?

Like many tales involving language, ethnicity and identity in the palimpsests of Central Europe, the answer isn’t exactly straightforward. To start, Budvar has made geography, not chronology, the crux of its case. Tough-to-pronounce České Budějovice (roughly chess-kay bood-yay-yo-vit-seh) has a history of making beer that dates all the way back to its founding in 1265. Budvar has reasonably argued that, as a descendent of a 750-year brewing tradition that is actually located in the city called Budweis (in German), it should be the brewery allowed to use the name Budweiser, rather than a brand invented in far-off Missouri.

But there are some overlooked elements to the case—like the much smaller brewery now known as Samson. Also located in the city of České Budějovice, it dates from the year 1795. If there’s an “original Budweiser,” Samson is it.

A second, smaller point: České Budějovice was once a town with both Czech and German speakers, who all got along swimmingly until, towards the end of the 19th century, they really didn’t, a topic covered by Jeremy King’s academic history Budweisers into Czechs and Germans, and which is actually how we ended up with Budvar in the first place.

Though Germans were the minority in České Budějovice, King writes, they enjoyed political power far beyond their number, including ownership of the Samson brewery and other important local institutions. Czech speakers founded the Czech-owned competitor Budvar amid the nationalistic fervor of the late 19th century, the same era when the Czech National Theatre was founded with the goal of letting locals hear opera and plays in their own language, rather than in German. There’s a noticeable amount of irony when a brewery founded on the idea of Czech independence fights for the right to use a German name.

In recent years, tiny old Samson has been an overlooked aspect of the beer world’s best-known trademark fight. At the same time, Samson’s quality suffered under successive ownership changes, earning the brewery a reputation for bad beer, and speculation about a possible closure.

And then, in 2014, the inevitable happened: after an initial purchase of some of its intellectual property, AB InBev bought all of struggling Samson, giving the maker of the American Budweiser a foothold in the very town of Budweis itself.

That story got lost among the news of AB InBev’s purchase of SABMiller in 2015, which required it to shed most of SABMiller’s Central and Eastern European brands, including Pilsner Urquell and other breweries that went to Asahi. Among those whirlwind sales, however, AB InBev held on to Samson.

Which is how we get to the present day, with Czech media reporting that AB InBev has started putting piles of money into Samson—almost $17 million since 2014. Meanwhile, under a new CEO, state-owned Budvar has launched major expansions of its own.

It’s almost as if a new front has opened in the beer world’s longest-running trademark war.